A HOUSE ON THE BAYOU (2021)

Studio:     Blumhouse/Epix
Director:    Alex McAulay
Writer:     Alex McAulay
Producer:  Paige Pemberton, Paul B. Uddo
Stars:     Angela Sarafyan, Paul Schneider, Lia McHugh, Jacob Lofland, Doug Van Liew, Lauren Richards, Rhonda Johnson Dent

Review Score:

---

Summary:

To repair their crumbling marriage, a troubled couple vacations with their daughter at a remote plantation house where two mysterious men challenge their perception of reality.

---

Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Jessica Chambers confronts her husband John about having an affair with one of his students, Vivienne Ballard. John agrees to Jessica’s demand that he immediately end his extramarital relationship. To repair the animosity in their marriage, John also agrees to a family vacation at a remote plantation house with their 14-year-old daughter Anna.

After settling in, Jessica instructs John to purchase veal cutlets for dinner despite John preferring hamburgers. At the store in town, Anna takes an interest in 18-year-old local Isaac, who flirts oddly with Anna. The storeowner, whom Isaac identifies as his Grandpappy, eyes John suspiciously when he tells Anna he couldn’t find veal, even though the store carries plenty. Grandpappy writes a note on John’s receipt that reads, “You are being watched by the devil.”

When they return to the house, John and Anna find Jessica trying to open a locked door to a mysterious room. The family is unable to get inside.

Isaac comes to the house to invite everyone to dinner with his Grandpappy. Jessica learns John lied about having to buy hamburger meat when Isaac says they will be cooking veal since their store has so much of it. To spite her husband, Jessica agrees to the dinner invitation.

Upset about having dinner with strangers, John shows Jessica the worrisome note on his receipt. John and Jessica have a fight about the veal that leads into a bigger argument about their marriage. John and Jessica eventually reconcile after John swears he ended his affair with Vivienne.

John and Jessica decide not to go to dinner after Anna suffers a sudden nosebleed. However, Isaac unexpectedly returns with his Grandpappy and offers to cook there. Although suspicious of Isaac’s motives, Jessica reluctantly allows the two men inside.

While Grandpappy cuts carrots in the kitchen, John asks him about the note he wrote on the receipt. Grandpappy cryptically says that when men do bad things, they sometimes open a door.

During dinner, Jessica’s concerns grow due to Isaac’s bizarre behavior, flirtation with Anna, and the way he seems to already know his way around the house. Isaac also performs apparent magic tricks, including lighting candles with his finger and later producing a key out of thin air. As the tension between everyone builds, Anna faints from a sudden nosebleed. Isaac becomes more aggressive when Jessica and John demand that he leave. Anna’s cat Toby inexplicably becomes trapped inside the locked room, which further escalates the family’s terror.

While Isaac supposedly uses the bathroom, Grandpappy tells the family he isn’t actually Isaac’s grandfather. Grandpappy claims he decided to take in Isaac after he mysterious appeared from the swamp one summer. Grandpappy also claims Isaac doesn’t age.

Grandpappy proposes playing music. Inexplicably, the record he chooses plays a recording of a private conversation in which John promises to divorce Jessica while professing his love to Vivienne. Jessica realizes John lied about ending his affair and had no intention of saving their marriage. To deflect the unwanted attention on him, John makes a claim that Jessica must be participating in a plot with the two men to torment him.

Isaac reenters the room with Anna’s cat safely in his arms. Jessica and Anna spot an unknown animal outside. The family becomes even more uncomfortable when Isaac retrieves a shotgun that he threateningly uses to further heighten their fear.

John agrees to go outside with Isaac. Once they’re alone, John reminds Isaac that he hired him to kill Jessica and to make the home invasion look like a robbery. John demands to know what Isaac is playing at by going off script with voodoo illusions and the recording of his conversation with Vivienne. Isaac agrees to go back to John’s original murder-for-hire scheme.

Jessica tells Grandpappy she believes Isaac is evil. Jessica bargains to leave John behind if Grandpappy agrees to let her and Anna leave, but Grandpappy refuses the offer.

John and Isaac come back inside. Despite promising to follow John’s plot, Isaac turns the tables by locking John inside the mysterious room instead of shooting Jessica.

Vivienne shows up at the front door saying she received an urgent text from John. Jessica quickly explains what is happening and instructs Vivienne to go to the police. However, Vivienne discovers her car will no longer start and she is now locked inside of it.

John demands to be let out of the locked room. Isaac tells John to open the closet door. When he does, a wolf attacks John.

At gunpoint, Grandpappy escorts Anna outside and threatens to shoot her mother unless she pours gasoline all over Vivienne’s car. To spare her daughter the trauma, Jessica pours the gasoline instead. Grandpappy sets the car on fire and Vivienne dies. Jessica uses the explosion as a distraction that allows her to beat Grandpappy to death with a hammer.

Jessica goes back inside the house to find the wolf mauling her husband. With his dying breath, John asks his wife to tell Vivienne that he loves her.

Jessica returns outside to find her daughter held hostage and Isaac proposing that he will run off with Anna. Isaac explains that John hired him to kill Jessica, but he decided John deserved to die instead.

Jessica wrestles away the shotgun and uses it to shoot Isaac. As he bleeds out on the ground, Jessica asks Isaac who he really is. Isaac claims he and Grandpappy built the house centuries ago for sinners like John, and it is their task as moral compasses to kill the wicked. Isaac coyly adds that he could be a demon, an angel, or just a confused kid.

Jessica and Anna escape in their car and drive to a sheriff’s station. After hearing about the ordeal, Deputy Torres tells Jessica that there isn’t a house at the location she described. Jessica insists that she and the deputy go there together. Upon returning to the property, Jessica is shocked to see that the house and the bodies inexplicably disappeared.

On their drive back to the station, Torres instructs Jessica to open her patrol car’s glove box. Jessica finds a video camera from the house whose footage shows Isaac asking Jessica to turn around. When she does, Jessica sees Isaac and Grandpappy driving by in their red pickup truck.

Torres tells Jessica that Isaac and Grandpappy aren’t human, but they help keep order by sending evildoers to Hell. Reminding Jessica that no one will believe the truth if she tries to tell it, Torres advises Jessica to embrace the second chance Isaac gave her and to never return to the house on the bayou. Torres throws the camera out the window and it bursts into flames. Jessica reunites with Anna back at the station.

---

Review:

Entertainment companies have funny rules regarding their logos. When I worked in video games, I produced a title with partners who were involved in a tie-in project using the IP, but who had nothing to do with making the actual game. The trouble was, their legally required logo included an elaborate sequence that lasted five times longer than our comparatively ordinary one. This Grand Canyon-sized disparity made it look like they were main players while we were some piddly Podunkers hitching a sad wagon to their brightly shining star. So we used a caveat in the contract that said we could swap animated logos for static ones as long as both parties were on equal footing. Voila! Out went uneven pomp and circumstance and in came two simple screens at three seconds each.

Seeing something similar at the start of “A House on the Bayou” reminded me of the surprising amount of information one can glean from company cards in opening credits. Produced by Blumhouse as the first in a multi-film deal with Epix, “A House on the Bayou” doesn’t start with Blumhouse’s familiar longform logo where the chair spins and a ghost girl paces. This shorter clip starts ten seconds later, with only the light bulb flickering over their name. Since Blumhouse doesn’t use the BH Tilt brand anymore, this is the initial indicator that you’re not about to enter a theatrical-level thriller. You’re in made-for-TV territory here, and that’s an important distinction for setting expectations straight.

To repair a relationship ruined by his extramarital affair, Jessica forces her husband John to agree to a family vacation with their 14-year-old daughter Anna. J essica had their destination settled long before finding out about John’s infidelity. As the property’s realtor, she knows of a private plantation nestled deep in Louisiana, so off everyone goes for some R&R in remote swampland.

Although John would rather have hamburgers, Jessica sends him to town to buy veal cutlets. The backwoods shop with a stereotypically shifty storeowner stocks plenty of veal, I guess it’s in high demand in the bayou, but John gets ground beef anyway. Meanwhile, Anna makes eyes with 18-year-old Isaac, also a stereotypically strange local yokel, whose weirdly suggestive advances nonetheless make the girl’s heart flutter.

Later, Isaac unexpectedly shows up at the house. Since their store carries so much veal, Isaac oddly invites everyone to dinner with his grandpappy, who happens to be the storeowner. Veal cutlets, you say? Although suspicious of the bizarre boy’s motives, Jessica accepts the unsolicited invitation just to get back at her husband for lying about having to buy burger meat.

It’s probably intended to be indicative of how couples use silly things to spite each other. But it’s equally silly to hear how many times “veal cutlets” gets said out loud in this movie. Writer/director Alex McAulay really goes all in on this obsession to a point where I started laughing whenever I heard those two words. I’m surprised no one who read the script ever said, “Can we cut maybe four or five of these veal cutlet-related scenes? There’ll still be about 15 left over.”

You’d be right to read the preceding paragraphs and think, “Sounds like some routine soap opera stuff.” It more or less is. True to its trimmed-down tailoring, “A House on the Bayou” operates a lot like a drama-driven stage play focused on five actors in a single location. It’s safe to predict quite a few viewers will turn off the movie during its first 30 minutes while double-checking if it truly came from Blumhouse or was inadvertently lifted off of Lifetime.

Before Jessica can exercise second thoughts about spending the evening with strangers, Isaac and Grandpappy end up back at the house to cook dinner there instead. Jessica reluctantly allows them inside. Once the meal gets underway, Isaac’s behavior graduates from vaguely uneasy to overtly unsettling. Not only does the aggressively intrusive teen already know his way around the house, he can apparently perform magic tricks like lighting candles without a match too. Jessica’s family now wonders, who are these mysterious men and what do they really want?

Due to everything described, “A House on the Bayou” comes across as more than a little flat. However, while this of course won’t be the case for everyone, I guiltily admit that the cryptic mystery regarding whether or not something supernatural is in play managed to maintain my attention even when scenes receded right back into mediocre marital melodrama.

Credit for keeping the mood moderately intriguing can be split among three of the five primary actors. Angela Sarafyan always carries that intangible “it” factor that draws eyes to her performances even when she’s drudging through a standard dissatisfied housewife role. Deep-voiced Doug Van Liew has the “imposing old country boy” persona down pat; I would have loved to have seen him in “Deadwood.” Last but certainly not least is Jacob Lofland, whose snide smirks turn Isaac into a perfectly punchable punk, which I say with genuine affection for a deliberately caustic character. Interesting actors can take middling material a long way, and this trio chews through runaround dialogue in ways that are enjoyable to watch.

I also feel obligated to award extra credit because I’ve always said, if you’re going to make a home invasion movie, you have to do something outside the box because you’ll never do “straight-up” better than “The Strangers” (review here). Well, “A House on the Bayou” puts enough spin on the concept to be relatively unique as a “family held hostage” thriller. Various revelations get wobbly during a denouement that has difficulty committing to a definitive direction. There’s also the not small matter of ignoring an inordinate amount of “refrigerator logic,” e.g. actions in the setup stage not holding up in retrospect once we learn what’s going on and logistical issues like a certain person driving from Texas to Louisiana based only on one text.

Yet some of these absurdities are what makes “A House on the Bayou” stand out, even if that’s not the kind of attention the movie desires. I already can’t stop shaking my head at the whole “veal cutlet” thing. (SPOILER) I also have to hand it to McAulay for depicting some seriously f*cked up family dysfunction by having John, before a wolf finishes mauling him, use his dying breath to ask his wife to tell his mistress that he loves her, then having that wife tearfully assure him that she would just so he can be at peace while the animal eats him.

Because it’s from Blumhouse, a lot of people are going to write off “A House on the Bayou” as one of Big B’s throwaway thrillers. As evidenced by the opening logo, it’s undeniable that “A House on the Bayou” is one of their lesser, lower-budgeted efforts. That doesn’t always indicate immediate ignorability (not a word) however. Set your standards to meet the movie’s lowered level and, like I did, you might find its occasional kookiness to be intermittently captivating.

Review Score: 60

---