Monster House (2006)

Monster House arrives from the summer of 2006 with the full Amblin apparatus behind it: Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg in the executive chairs, Gil Kenan making his directorial debut, and a motion-capture pipeline still warm from The Polar Express. It concerns a suburban street, a curmudgeonly neighbor named Nebbercracker, and the sentient dwelling that proves to be his late wife Constance, a woman rescued from freak-show exploitation and later suffocated in cement beneath her own unfinished foundation. Three children pelt the house with cold medicine, grab its chandelier uvula, and eventually destroy it with dynamite at a construction site. This is a haunted-house picture with a melancholy streak, and it performs that job well.

As a cultural document, the film is nearly barren. The voice cast is overwhelmingly white, with Nick Cannon as Officer Lister supplying the only notable exception, and his presence reads as ordinary ensemble hiring, not a representational program. There is no LGBTQ content of any kind, no engagement with race or identity, no environmental sermonizing, no critique of wealth or class, no body-image discourse, and no neurodivergent characters. Jenny is quick, capable, and the one who seizes the uvula to save the boys, which is agreeable and entirely consistent with plucky-kid tradition stretching back decades. The antagonist is a grieving poltergeist who misses his wife. Nobody in this film is a system.

The picture contains no thesis, which is its quiet virtue. It wants to frighten children and then send them home, and it does so with craft and a gothic affection for the genre. There is no lecture waiting at the end, no moral delivered with a straight face, no instruction on how to feel about the world beyond the screen. For a Hollywood product of its era, that restraint is almost quaint. Sommeliers of social consciousness will find little to swirl and sniff here. Score it accordingly and pour the next one.