Housebound (2014)

Housebound arrives from New Zealand in 2014 carrying a haunted house, a court-ordered ankle monitor, and no apparent interest in instructing anyone about anything. Gerard Johnstone's debut concerns Kylie Bucknell, a recidivist burglar confined to her mother's home, where a hostile spirit turns out to be a young man named Eugene living inside the walls. The film is brisk, gory, and wholly unconcerned with the moral improvement of its audience. We classify it, then, as a clean specimen of the pre-sermon era, a genre exercise that wants only to make you laugh and then flinch.

Kylie is not a heroine assembled for our approval. She is surly, alienating, and slow to accept her mother as a person with a past and a private life. The mother-daughter friction carries the plot, and the women are permitted to be unpleasant without the film pausing to redeem them in political terms. This is texture, not thesis. The casting of Rima Te Wiata and Glen-Paul Waru places Māori performers in ordinary roles, a nagging mother and a security contractor, and the film never once gestures at what that might signify. They are simply people in a house.

Eugene, the young savant in the crawlspace, brushes against the autistic-genius trope, though the screenplay treats him as a horror contrivance with a soldering iron and a talent for high-voltage switches, not as a statement about neurodivergence. The result is a film with almost no ideological furniture in it. No lecture. No moral. Just exploding heads, garden shears, and a partial denture doing plot work. We score it accordingly, and we do so with something close to admiration.