Panic Fest 2025 Coverage
House of Ashes review
A woman faces off with more than one kind of nightmare in House of Ashes.
Festival reviews will not contain spoilers.
House of Ashes
Directed by Izzy Lee
Written by Steve Johanson and Izzy Lee
Starring Fayna Sanchez, Vincent Stalba, Mason Conrad, Lee Boxleitner, Laura Dromerick, Steve Johanson and Joe Lynch
House of Ashes Review
There’s no confusion about where House of Ashes draws its inspiration from. Its protagonist faces many nightmares…all based on unfortunately realistic events. She’s lost her husband to an unexpected, and possibly misclassified, suicide. She’s lost her pregnancy to miscarriage and because of the law in the state she lives in…finds herself under house arrest after being convicted for it. If these weren’t enough traumatizing events for one person to endure…her new boyfriend is slowly turning into a controlling, toxic monster. A Tik Tok star won’t stop trying to get some face time at the house of a now infamous convict. Oh…and the house may be haunted.
House of Ashes deals with realistic nightmares and layers supernatural ones on top of them. It works in the way it’s intended to. Leaving the scary parts to be felt in the believable (even if they shouldn’t be) events that haunt her life. Mia (Fayna Sanchez) is stuck. Physically and emotionally. She can’t leave her house for a year…physically trapped inside an increasingly dangerous situation.
There’s a lot going on there. Trauma, of course. How can Mia mourn the loss of her family if she’s forced to relive it every morning that she can’t leave their home? How can she escape a toxic relationship if she’s legally unable to get away? The answer, obviously, is that she can’t. Punished for something absurd…judged responsible for one of the worst events of her life. Her new boyfriend, Marc (Vincent Stalba), is growing increasingly angry over her inability to clean out her late husband’s possessions. The police are uninterested in her plight…as long as she keeps her ankle monitor charged. There is no way out.
House of Ashes doesn’t start ramping up the unexplainable phenomenon until it has established Mia’s situation as direly as it can. She starts seeing and hearing things…which, of course, she couldn’t run from if she wanted to. Like any good horror story, House of Ashes pushes its sight inwards and looks at what victories Mia can achieve. Defiance over her husband’s possessions. A supernaturally aided investigation into buried secrets. A one location, slow but steady, regaining one’s autonomy.
House of Ashes’ story comes from a place of genuine fear. Marc is an ex-boyfriend who has been there for Mia in her time of need. Their relationship progressing to the point it has in the midst of Mia’s grief makes sense. He also, inevitably, provides a physical obstacle for her. Trauma and spirits are fine…but they’re harder to fight…cinematically speaking. His change in personality seems to coincide with the ramp up in strange occurrences plaguing Mia. It lends House of Ashes an immediate and understandable threat…even if it’s not immediately understood why.
Sanchez gives a great lead performance as Mia. We meet her at a low point. One that there doesn’t appear to be any escape from. As things around her become less stable in both supernatural and realistic ways…Sanchez makes Mia’s torment believable. How do you overcome an unreasonable situation when you are forced to live with it? That’s true of her miscarriage, the loss of her husband, the way society and law enforcement treat her, the change in her boyfriend’s demeanor…and the strange things that have begun to appear around her.
House of Ashes presents a genuinely frightening scenario and knows that no amount of ghostly hijinks is going to outpace it. Mia’s problems aren’t her doing…and she’s been greatly handicapped in overcoming them. Trapped in the house that should have been filled with familial joy for decades to come. Faced at every turn with resentment for simply trying to exist. When courts, cops, loved ones and society are so quick to turn on you…you’re all you have left.
Scare Value
It isn’t hard to see where House of Ashes gets its inspiration from. Mia is trapped from every direction. By an absurd and unfortunately no longer unrealistic law…by an increasingly toxic relationship…by the trauma of recent losses. The horror here is too realistic to ignore. And that’s before the house appears to become haunted.
