House of Spoils review
House of Spoils serves up a mixture of tasty performance and stale story.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
House of Spoils
Directed by Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy
Written by Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy
Starring Ariana DeBose, Marton Csokas, Barbie Ferreira, Arian Moayed, Jeremy Wheeler, Dorka Gryllus and Gabriel Drake
House of Spoils Review
Where was I when cooking stories became so popular? I’m not complaining about it…it just feels like it came out of nowhere. Is this some years later runoff from reality tv shows? Enough people watched famous chefs leading kitchens to demand more and more fictional versions of the stories? I’ve seen almost none of them. I couldn’t tell you anything about the profession. The only thing I know about it is that it seems very stressful, chefs appear to have giant egos, and I think it’s what The Bear is about. Unless it’s about a bear.
House of Spoils, it won’t surprise you to learn, is about a chef. Academy Award winner Ariana DeBose plays the chef in question. I’m pretty sure the character’s name is just “Chef”. Is it a clever ploy to hammer home that her profession is her identity? I guess. Frankly, the chef aspects of House of Spoils rarely rise above those few things I think I knew about them to begin with. It seems very stressful. It involves a lot of ego. Oh…and there’s a witch.
Ok, I’ve buried the lede a little.
Chef quits her high paying job as a sous chef to open her own restaurant in the middle of nowhere. The place is seemingly haunted by its previous owner…a woman the locals believed to be a witch. Chef crafts a menu around items found in the witch’s garden. It leads to rave reviews and…wait for it…a slow descent into madness. Slow Descent into madness is the new influencer horror film, it seems.
House of Spoils is all about that madness. It gives us the ego and the stress that comes with the profession…and turns it into all out madness. It’s not a bad concept. The idea of opening a world-class, high-end, fine dining restaurant in the boonies might be an even better one. The story doesn’t pay enough attention to it, honestly. It’s such a strange business decision. That plot could sustain a premium television series. … Is that what The Bear is about?
Chef’s stress consistently threatens the upcoming opening. She sees bugs and rot everywhere she looks. Her main investor is getting nervous. Her main chef is getting offended. And…then there’s the witch. The Witch demands that the soil be fed. House of Spoils does the descent into madness storyline well. DeBose is great in the role. She pulls off every angle of the character the movie shifts into. From confident to smug to troubled to crazed. The role offers DeBose the opportunity to show her range and inhabit an interesting character.
House of Spoils ramps up the insanity nicely. Stray moments become full blown panic. Meanwhile, we get a good look at how the people around Chef see things unfolding. It creates a strong juxtaposition between Chef’s view and what’s really happening. Others see her spiraling. She sees every imperfection magnified to an unbearable degree. And, of course, the witch.
I haven’t talked much about the witch because it’s not an easy thing to discuss. Until the climax of the story, you don’t really get a good bead on what her intentions are. Chef comes to believe that she means to destroy her attempts to launch her dream restaurant. But her ingredients are a hit. We won’t discover what wisdom or destruction the witch intends until Chef finds herself locked in the cellar and needs to crawl through the catacombs and into the witch’s den. The supernatural aspects of House of Spoils are mostly kept to Chef’s perspective of the world. But they are effective enough and do provide a possible answer for what’s going on.
The movie is light on scares. Perhaps that’s better described as void of. It’s more interested in delivering a character piece than a fright fest. A psychological horror story minus the horror. I’m not sure that the movie even marketed itself as a horror film…so that is what it is. Mostly, House of Spoils is a showcase for DeBose. A psychological profile of a Chef under even more stress than normal. That’s what House of Spoils is all about. As for what The Bear is all about…I fear we will never know.
Scare Value
House of Spoils feeds you a lot of questionable dishes and then never gets to the desert. The ambiance is nice, at least. Seriously though, DeBose is great, the movie is interesting enough…it just never reaches any peaks of true excitement. It’s more effective as a dark comedy about a chef attempting to start their own restaurant from scratch than as a thriller or supernatural horror story. The problem is…I don’t think it’s intended to be seen as the former. Watchable.
2.5/5
House of Spoils Link
Streaming on Prime Video
