Short Version
Love these kids, hate this movie.
Long Version
Our House was released in the US in July of 2018 by IFC Midnight and Elevation Pictures, but Box Office Mojo has its total take at $24,039 so released is probably a strong word. It’s available to watch on Netflix. Directed by Anthony Scott Burns and starring Thomas Mann, who’s got a great face, and Nicola Peltz, who’s not in the movie a whole lot, Our House is another in a long list of examples of why you should never, ever try to raise the dead.
Spoilers! You’ve been alerted.
Our House is about a nice family who live in a nice suburb and eat dinner together. Someone on the production team LOVES the English Beat because the opening scene has the father, John Ralston, wearing an English Beat T-shirt attempting to fix a record player in order to listen to an English Beat album. It’s a weird choice, like wearing a KISS shirt to a KISS concert. Ethan, Thomas Mann, is home from college which doesn’t happen often enough as far as his folks are concerned. His two younger siblings, played by Percy Hynes White and Kate Moyer, miss him as much as their parents do, but Ethan has to get back to school ASAP to test his “machine” which is supposed to provide wireless electricity. Back at school, the test doesn’t go well. The machine doesn’t work and causes a blackout. To make matters worse, Ethan receives a phone call from his brother informing him that his parents have been in an accident and are, sadly, now dead.
Three months later, Ethan is back home, working at a hardware store, taking his brother and sister to school, and avoiding the dishes. I’m not sure how he’s making it all work with just the hardware store job, but maybe there was a little inheritance money, I don’t know. He’s brought his machine with him and he works on it in the garage where we discover that, hey, it does work, it just produces ghosts instead of wireless electricity. The ghosts can communicate with the humans and the ghosts ask the humans to please turn up the knob on the ghost machine. No one thinks that’s suspicious so Ethan enlists the help of his neighbor Tom, played by Robert B. Kennedy, who works at the power plant, to juice up the ghostometer and that’s when all spectral hell breaks loose.
I like the kids, they’re an earnest, believable family, and Robert B. Kennedy is decent as the creepy neighbor. The wispy smoke-ghosts are kind of cool – you get the full idea from the poster – and they manage to be scary a couple of times, but this movie takes way too long getting where it’s going and where it’s going ain’t great. It’s like being told you’re going to Disneyland and winding up at Chuck E. Cheese. The ghost back stories don’t make any sense, plot devices get introduced way too late, and no one is ever really in danger. The only people that die are the parents and as far as I know, their deaths aren’t ghost related. It does have a beginning, middle, and end, but I’d skip it unless you get desperate.
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