Amazon Blumhouse originals simply play it safe. Their latest project, “House of Spoils,” from the talented duo behind the twisted “Blow the Man Down,” is another project under this banner that lacks the courage to follow through with its best ideas. It’s stuck in neutral, another horror movie that threatens to get weird and powerful but ends up playing it depressingly safe. This movie is about primal instincts, a deeply feminine connection to Mother Earth; it needs to be dirty, grimy, and atmospheric. It doesn’t quite have enough of those things, stranding Oscar winner Ariana DeBose in a movie that seems deeply uncertain about what story it’s telling, shifting gears from a jump-scare horror movie to something that seems unearned in the final act. Jason Blum is a powerful and underrated force in the industry, but I wish he would empower his chefs to cook up more interesting horror movie fare.
Written and directed by Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy, “House of Spoils” is the story of a chef (DeBose) who’s been working at a prestigious restaurant for seven years under the tutelage of a talented guy named Marcello (Marton Csokas, doing a lot with little screen time). He finds her so talented that he offers to double her salary when she informs him she’s quitting the job to open her own restaurant in the middle of nowhere, but she’s determined to strike out on her own path. With a hot-tempered investor named Andres (Arian Moayed), they plan to open a “destination restaurant,” a place people would drive hours to just to experience it, but they’re doing it in what’s basically a remote haunted house. That should work out just fine.
DeBose’s unnamed chef moves into the old, run-down house, where things start to go wrong almost immediately. She starts seeing bugs in some of the food, while the rest looks moldy and rotten. She hears things at night and sees shadows, but Cole and Krudy don’t have enough atmosphere for this section to work. “House of Spoils” should be truly creepy, a story that combines the unimaginable pressure of a dream job with the supernatural, but it doesn’t lean hard enough into either. We never really feel threatened by either the profession or the poltergeist.
Before long, our chef finds a garden deep within the estate that opens her palate and allows her to choose her menu. This is the best idea in Cole and Krudy’s script: to think that haute cuisine has moved too far away from the primal aspect of cooking, of living off the land. The center of “House of Spoils,” where the chef and her sous Lucia (Barbie Ferreira) develop a menu of unimaginable textures and flavors, is easily the best thing in the film.
Problems come when “House of Spoils” has to remember that it is an October horror movie, but seems almost ashamed to do so. A movie that really needs to be released. strange She’s as afraid to go there as a chef who doesn’t trust his own knife skills. And that leaves DeBose totally abandoned. I’ve already seen some claim that she’s overreacting here, and I would argue that she’s at the cash register where the rest of the film seems unable to meet her, which makes her seem overreacting because of the lack of tension the film builds around her.
At one point, a restaurant critic (Amara Karan) tears down our heroine by telling her that her food has no risk, no soul, no voice. I wouldn’t go that far in describing “House of Spoils,” but I find it fascinating to see a film that incorporates a critique of how creative people can be hampered by their refusal to take risks in a film that does exactly that.
This review was brought to you by Fantastic Fest. It premieres on Amazon Prime Video on October 3.Third.