House Hunting (2013)

It’s a tale of two families—Hays and Thomson.  Charlie Hays (Marc Singer) has his hands full with a new(ish) wife, Susan (Hayley DuMond), and a teen daughter, Emmy (Janey Gioiosa), who hates her.  Biological mom ran off with another man.  Charlie works for a company (bank? investment firm?) that foreclosed on a farm, house and 70 acres, and Dad is taking the family out to look at it, thinking he may want to buy. 

Other family.   Don Thomson (Art LeFleur) is a grouch who is being dragged from one open house to another by his wife Leslie (Victoria Vance) and his teen son Jason (Paul McGill).  As he stands, smoking, in front of a suburban mediocrity that looks pretty much like the one they just left, a man wearing one of those hideous arctic hats with earflaps—mukluks for the head—and leading a dog on a leash approaches him.  They agree that the neighborhood sucks and the man gives Don a card with an address on it, an address for the perfect place, a farm on 70 acres. 

The Hays family arrives at the house first, but they are immediately followed by the Thomsons.  The two men appraise each other as rivals for the property, but neither of them goes into the building beyond the foyer, and then they decide to leave. 

As Charlie drives away from the house, a young woman rushes from the woods in front of his car.  He smacks into a tree, but gets out and goes to her, sees that he didn’t hit her but that still she is covered in blood. 

Don pulls up behind him.  Since Charlie’s car is too scrunched up to drive, Don offers to take him and the young woman back to the house so they can call for help.  The young woman, Hanna (Rebekah Kennedy), tries to flee in fear.  When they ask her why, the families discover that she has recently had her tongue cut out. 

All seven people cram into Don’s car and head back to the highway, but end up every time they try back at the house.  Which apparently doesn’t want them to leave.  In the pantry, they find seven cans of beef stew.  They think they see the man with the hat walking his dog, but when they shout at him to stop, he disappears. 

A month later, a month of no communication with the outside world, there continue to be seven cans of stew on the shelf every day. 

Until the day there are only six. 

The film was written and directed by Eric Hurt, who plays around nicely with the devices of the traditional ghost story.  What he does best is suggest a meaning for what the families are going through while keeping a definitive explanation just out of reach.  The best ghost stories don’t tell you what you you need to know in order to make the oddness understandable.  That’s not the way ghosts work in real life (so they tell me).  It’s said that the difference between a fictional ghost story and a real one is that the fictional haunting makes sense and the actual one doesn’t.  Hauntings don’t always happen out of a need for spectral revenge, or for the completion of some unfinished business. 

If you need an explanation in this case, imdb says that the film’s script is loosely based on Sartre’s play No Exit.  You can extrapolate a meaning from that. 

The acting is fine and production values are good.  There’s not a lot to be said yay or nay about either thing.  The real pleasure comes from watching a contemporary ghost movie that looks further back for inspiration than last week’s episode of some ghost hunting show on cable TV.