Netflix’s stop-motion nightmare The House goes to places you really can’t unsee

polygon.com:

Maybe it isn’t saying much to note that Netflix’s stop-motion film The House features the most disturbing, skin-crawling, stomach-flipping vermin-based musical number since the 2019 CG-fest Cats. After all, there isn’t much competition for that title. But it should count for something that this collection of three weird animated stories is so capable of unnerving an audience with something so gleeful and playful. The film isn’t traditional horror, but it has deep-rooted horror elements that may creep up on viewers, just like those dancing parasites do.

Two of The House’s three stories look like they could take place in the same world as Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox: The protagonists here are similar anthropomorphic animals, constructed with the same kind of softness and warmth, and sometimes operating with the same kind of anxiety-fueled chattiness. But where Fantastic Mr. Fox is a quaint, homey fantasy, The House heads much further into the surreal stop-motion territory of Czech artist Jan Švankmajer. The film’s visual style is deceptively cozy, but the stories are anything but.

In the first of the three 30-minute segments (titled I, II, and III), a family of four living quietly in the country are thrown off-course by a visit from some hateful relatives, who sneer at the father, Raymond (Watchmen’s Matthew Goode) for the modest ambitions that have him living in such a small, rural home. Shortly after that, a mysterious, eccentric architect offers to build the seething Raymond and his dubious but supportive wife Penny (Claudie Blakley) a lavish new home, on the condition that they move there and never leave. Their young daughter Mabel (Mia Goth) is horrified by the changes in her parents when they move into their