Review: In the House (15)

Watching through fascinated eyes from the sidelines is the boy’s literature teacher who becomes absorbed in the essays his pupil writes on 
the family, its characters, tensions created and witnessed.

As the essays evolve into chapters, each one “to be continued” so schoolmaster becomes vicarious interloper, just as the boy becomes a creepy little voyeur, spying 
on his group muse and inveigling his way into its shared life.

In Hollywood hands this would be just another hackneyed tale of the bad seed. Ozon instead presents his juvenile hero/villain as a fantasist whose flights of fancy – can they be true, argues the teacher and his wife? – are rooted in reality. And as the story progresses so the teacher, himself a failed creative writer, cannot stop himself from wanting more.

A first-rate cast – Fabrice Luchini, Emmanuelle Seigner, Kristin Scott Thomas and Ernst Umhauer as the kid with the quill – dance through the interconnecting threads of this tale of mentorship gone awry.

Ozon presents the adults as bored and unfulfilled, trapped within monotony and tedium as life passes them by.

They yearn for freedom. The boy (Umhauer) represents an escape: first via his writing, then his sense of unfettered exploration, finally by his combination of naivety and bold longing.

Nobody escapes unscathed in an Ozon film. In this, Umhauer’s own story is only ellipsed until Ozon (fatally? deliberately?) reveals what’s going on at home.

It’s not enough to provide a valid and lucid explanation but hints at how all star writers cannibalise their own life for inspiration.