The Open House (2018)

I have had the opening paragraph of a review of The Open House sitting in my drafts for months because this movie was just too bland to say much about it. The actors were doing their very best, which is about the only solidly good thing I can say for it. Unfortunately, though they did try, they were unable to polish this turd into a diamond. Heads up, this is going to be a very spoilery review because I had some severe issues with the ending that kind of ruined the already mediocre movie. Full spoilers ahead!

Open House (on Netflix now, if you hate yourself enough to watch it) started off kind of spooky, with a mom and son who are financially broke and move into a big fancy house in the middle of nowhere that is in the process of being sold. Suddenly, weird things start happening... is the mom or son going insane?!?! No one knows! ...Except the audience, that is, because the film makes it clear pretty early on that there is a guy at least hanging around in their house, if not just straight up living there. 

So anyway, weird stuff starts happening (doors are open that were once closed, the water heater keeps going out, cell phones go missing and reappear in the wrong place, personal stuff gets torn up and thrown in the garbage, weird crap like that). Again, the audience knows that this is a completely different character (that we never see - more on that in a minute) but the mom in the film thinks her son is being an asshole and screwing with her because his dad died and they had to move to the middle of nowhere during the son's senior year of highschool. Now, the son is pissed about this, but obviously isn't messing with his recently widowed mom, but instead of being curious as to why a bunch of weird stuff is happening, he instead gets defensive and pulls a "I wish you had died instead of Dad!" which really only convinces his mom more that he's jerking her chain.

If we didn't already know there was another guy in the house, this gambit may have worked to create tension - what if the son IS just being a total dick?! Instead it gets grating and, frankly, both characters say and do things that make them more unlikable. By the time they figure it's a guy in their house doing this, there's barely any movie left and they spent SO MUCH TIME thinking the other was crazy and being dicks to each other. It wasn't suspenseful, it was just hard to watch.

As for the guy who was actually doing weird stuff - okay, pause on that for a second. First I should talk about the red herrings. There are two of them in the movie (basically the only other characters in the movie). One is a good looking guy who works at a store in town and flirts with the mom. He is basically around long enough to flirt, piss off the son, go missing for a bit so you think he died due to bad editing, then he comes back to help out but is almost immediately killed. The problem is this character is played by the guy who played Dr. Gallant on ER, and if the casting director of this movie wanted me to believe this guy was maybe a creeper who was living in their house, then they shouldn't have cast one of the nicest doctors to ever grace the halls of County General.

The other red herring is an old woman who lives next door and seems kind of creepy, but actually just has dementia and sometimes doesn't remember her husband is dead. She also doesn't seem plausible as the villain here. There are also a couple of throwaway characters who are either sketchy realtors or cops who think it's just teens playing a prank. No, it's not until the climax of the movie that we meet the ACTUAL villain... some guy we never see!

So during the final confrontation, mom and son are both attacked by this unseen guy - first the mom gets assaulted (torture porn style finger breaks) then gets accidentally stabbed by the son. After mom is dead, the bad guy nonsensically pins the son to the floor during a struggle and delicately take out the kid's contact lenses so he can't see him, which makes no real sense since he then immediately chases the kid through the woods and kills him anyway! Afterward, the killer walks away and lives to kill another day. 

My problem isn't that we don't know who the killer is - that's fine, there have been some great films where you never find out the true identity of the killer and it makes it scarier because what if he's still out there?! Buuuuuuut it doesn't really work in this movie because this guy's motive seems to be squatting in various houses that are for sale after sneaking in during an open house and then messing with and eventually killing the owners. I would get it if there were something about that specific house, like at the end of it he just kind of retreated into the basement waiting for his next victims, but he end of the movie shows the guy driving toward a different home with an "OPEN HOUSE" sign in front of it. The motivation there just doesn't make sense... and he's clearly not any of the cops or realtors (or a plumber I just remembered) we saw in the movie because you couldn't just squat in random houses and still be able to maintain a day job like that. So it's just some guy who goes from house to house pranking people until he gets bored enough to kill them. That's it. Lame movie, lame ending, don't bother watching while other better movies exist.