We all love a good haunted house story. A home is a place where we all feel secure and safe, protected from the terrors of the outside world, but what if the terror lurks inside your own home? With a haunted house story, we’re shown just how flimsy and unsafe the walls of our own house really can be. But it’s not just the ghosts and ghouls that make a good haunted house story, it’s the people living in the homes who bring their own fears and insecurities with them. Many times with ghost stories, the entities in the house prey on the long-simmering and unspoken anxieties among the characters, amplifying them until they boil over. Most stories about spooky houses really are just domestic dramas but with the volume turned all the way up. Such is the case with the new Argentinian film The Funeral Home, where a family not only has to contend with a house filled with wandering lost souls but their long-simmering drama with each other.
The set up to The Funeral Home is interesting and bypasses the usual “family moving into the new home and slowly discovering the ghosts” set up. Instead, we’re dropped into a situation where the family is already well aware of the spirits that they share their home with and have worked out an uneasy way of living with their ethereal housemates, as long as certain rules are observed. Of course, this is a horror movie, so the rules are only set up so that the characters can break them, and soon our poor family must deal with a malevolent presence in the house with dark intentions. This is a briskly paced horror film, with a lean hour and a half runtime, all set in one location, an old funeral home that our characters live and work in. The scares in this film come fast without sacrificing set up and atmosphere and most of the action centers around the three main characters, the angsty daughter, the pushover step-dad, and the seemingly stressed-out mother trying to keep it all together. As with every haunted house film, each of these characters is harboring a secret side that the house starts to bring out and exploit.
If there’s one thing that hurts this film, it’s that there’s a lot of “telling and not showing”. We get most of the backstory and relationship dynamics between the characters via dialogue, and it oftentimes comes off as forced and awkward, though some of this may be because of translation issues. It feels like this was a drawback to having all of the action take place in one location because it limited what the film could show us. For the most part, this film balances the dialogue-heavy moments with the more visual scare scenes well, but given the lean run time, I felt that it could have padded the story out more and unfolded a lot of the backstory more organically instead of through exposition.
Overall though, The Funeral Home is a very solidly made, effective, and original horror movie. While it probably could have spiced up a lot of the dialogue and exposition, the scares and characters all make up for it. Like most good haunted house stories, the real terror comes from the main character’s psyche, which poses more of a danger to them than anything supernatural ever could. I think we’ve all wondered what it would be like to live in an old funeral home, and this film explores that idea to its most extreme- and horrifying- conclusion.
James Reinhardt