Home Improvements (Patreon)

His House (Remi Weekes, 2020)

Thematically, haunted houses are all about history. As such, they can serve as a handy metaphor for personal as well as political scenarios, and it takes a deft hand to avoid calling on simple cliches and mistaking them for insight. His House is unusual in that it uses the idea of a haunting or a curse as a highly specific means for exploring both cultural displacement and survivors' guilt. Bol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) are refugees from South Sudan who have escaped to the U.K. In addition to carrying the weight of all those who did not make it -- friends and family they saw slaughtered, those who died during the perilous journey, as well as the ancestors left behind in their homeland -- the couple bear the added pressure of demonstrating to their host country that they are "good ones." That's to say, immigrants are expected to earn their place by being model citizens, and are thereby deprived of the moral complexity that makes them human.

Weekes does a lot with a little, focusing much of the supernatural disruption within the couple's assigned apartment. It's an ideological space, one Bol and Rial have to prove they deserve. (Several Brits working for the immigration service comment, "your flat's bigger than mine.") But it also becomes the micro-theater for physical and psychological disruption. The discovery of a occasionally present hole in the wall, through which the spirits of the dead emerge, recalls Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse, especially when Bol begins scraping the walls into nothing. 

When we find out exactly what has followed the pair from the Sudan, and the precise debt that must be repaid, His House brings its politics forward, asking us to consider the plight of the individual and not just "a people." Survival is random; no one is more or less deserving of human life. His House is ultimately about the trauma of transitioning into the ordinary.

Build the Wall (Joe Swanberg, 2020)

A possible third installment in the "Uncle Kent" saga, Build the Wall is a featurette that builds on Swanberg's recent turn toward accessibility. But it's also strangely airy and undefined, probably the result of Swanberg returning (I'm guessing) to his improvisational ways. The film is almost beyond interpretation, in the sense that it is so symbolism-forward that parsing its means is a bit like treating traffic cones like sculpture. There's a wall. There are trees. And there is a hatchet that, when things get rough, is swapped out for a chainsaw.

Kent (Kent Osborne) is living in a nice place in the woods in Vermont. (All that Spongebob money, no doubt.) He's having another ambiguous sex visitor, in the form of Sarah (Jane Adams), an artist he knows from the Internet who is coming to collaborate. Their private flirtation rendezvous, which coincides with Kent's 50th birthday, is disrupted by the appearance of an old friend (Kevin Bewersdorf), a stonemason who had agreed, a long time ago, to build Kent a wall as a birthday present. Kent and Sarah try to have their thing, while mostly ignoring the guy breaking rocks (and eventually summoning helpers) right outside.

Swanberg ekes a few nice comedy-of-embarrassment moments out of the scenario. Kent chastening Sarah for not reaffixing the shower curtain after she showers is weird, all the more so because he brings it up right after they've fucked. But essentially, Build the Wall is a collection of material objects -- barriers and slippery pathways, assembling the horizontal and felling the vertical -- with some hemming and hawing caulked into the in-between spaces. Admirably slight, really.