Metacritic-Rezensionen

LaBute rewards patient viewers with two amazing lead performances, crackling dialogue, and genuine suspense. While the film might be flawed, it is imminently watchable.

With his latest film, “House of Darkness,” LaBute tries something similar to "The Wicker Man." And while the results may not be nearly as outlandish this time around, they do make for an intriguing and occasionally quite witty battle of the sexes, in which not all of the bloodshed is strictly metaphorical.

LaBute is meticulously escalating the danger by providing Hap his wildest dreams in a way that reveals to the audience how their ability to come true is reliant upon him losing control.

House of Darkness leaves audiences with much to consider as the credits roll and blood red titles draw a discreet veil over this contemporary Gothic offering.

Few can write this kind of acid-dripping parlor drama with as much bite as LaBute.

As a whole, House of Darkness is a very mixed bag of a film. The script shifts from nuanced to blunt depending on what minute you're watching, but the central performances add a layer of complexity that's often worth watching.

Where Josh Ruben’s Scare Me soars thanks to tension delivered through imaginative monologues, LaBute’s latest is mostly benign chatter that rambles its way to an unimpressively expected conclusion.

Ultimately, House Of Darkness exists in a strange and equally fatal no man’s land of being simultaneously under- and overwritten. As a feature film, it’s entirely insubstantial, with a premise better served in short form as part of an anthology.

Here is House of Darkness anyway, a talky, allegorical horror film that delivers plenty of LaBute’s typically sharp irony and observations but little raison d’être. It is sometimes insightful, just not about women, who outnumber the men three to one.

Cinematically-static if well-acted, and dramatically-flat throughout, it’s an end-of-the-date story of gamesmanship, competing agendas and differing interpretations of what’s going on in a coupling towards copulation sense.