Ok, so once you get past Netflix shoving this film down your throat with their top image when it first came out, and you actually get to the film, well, you’ll be disappointed.

The Open House is about a mother and son who move to their sister/aunty’s cabin while they sort their financial stuff out as their father/husband has just died. The only issue is the cabin is being sold and so the pair must be out of the house every Sunday so potential buyers can take a look around. This means random strangers will be wandering around this pretty big house and one potential buyer isn’t looking into the house but more into the pair that live there.

Spooky goings on start happening and the son, Logan, feels something isn’t right but nothing is really done about this. There’s obviously tension between the mother and son and quite a few red-herring characters that honestly lead to nowhere when finally it is revealed that the killer…is just some random guy.

What?

Ok, back up. So we see the killer come into the home during open house but we only see his feet. We then see him in other shots over the character’s shoulder or in the background or whatever so he is clearly just having a wander and you think, with the dad being killed, maybe he has something to do with that. Well nope.

So it gets to the big climactic scene and Logan has invited local man Chris round, who his mother has been getting along well with, to help them take care of the house and keep them safe after a break in. A break in where all they did was lay out a fancy table and play some cute Christmas songs. I mean what? It was weird.

So Logan is wandering about the house and sees Chris’ car outside and finds a murdered Chris inside the car. Terrifying right? So then the killer slams Logan’s head into the car window and covers him in, what I thought first to be gasoline, you know to blow him and the car up, but no actually turns out to be water. Yep just standard old water. Because it’s cold outside and he wants him to freeze to death I guess?

Anyway back inside the killer ties his mum up to a chair and breaks each of her fingers. Now I watched this and thought ‘wow this killer seems to have a lot of passion in him to kill these guys, I guess there must really be a good reason behind it’ yet nope. Nothing. We never find out his motive.

Soon Logan wakes up and goes to find his mum but before he can get help or whatever she is taken by the killer down these hidden hallways under the ground where Logan accidentally stabs his mother while defending himself. The killer is there but doesn’t kill Logan immediately. Instead he takes out his contacts (legit the only reason this kid wore contacts/had bad eyesight was so there was some gorey-ness to an otherwise boring movie) and tells the boy to run which he finds hard to do because he cannot see.

But wait! Earlier in the movie we are shown he can run at almost ‘olympic’ speeds and has been running around this forest so surely he’d be able to navigate it well enough and while being cold would still be pretty fast compared to normal people?

Anyway, he gets away, but the killer soon catches up and kills him. Done. Then we see what we can assume to be the killer driving to another open house to basically do the same thing all over again.

But if this was just some random guy why did it seem so over the top and gruesome? Why didn’t he kill them quickly? Why did he want to kill them in the first place? And when Logan’s dad is killed Logan shows him a song just before that, that he loves. The killer plays the exact same song when he’s taunting Logan and his mum so why would he do that? And how does he know that’s what that song signifies?

This movie left me with a lot of questions and I honestly didn’t enjoy it. I felt it could’ve been so much more yet it wasn’t. It was a shame as it is quite a good premise and if you made it more about the dad’s death and how the killer had unfinished business with the family or whatever it could’ve been fantastic.

Yet it wasn’t.

What did you think of The Open House?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding