Hausen (2020) Review

Hausen (2020) Review

After the death of his mother, 16-year-old Juri (Tristan Göbel) and his father Jaschek (Charly Hübner) move into a run-down housing complex on the outskirts of the city. While Jaschek tries to establish a new existence for himself and his son as caretaker of the building, Juri gradually discovers that the house has a vicious life of its own and feeds on the suffering of its inhabitants. In order to fight it, Juri has to persuade the partly hostile, partly apathetic block population to cooperate – and to rebel against his father, who has already fallen deep under the building’s corrosive spell…

From the very first episode I found HAUSEN to be hard work. I loved the visuals, the production design and the acting but what I couldn’t get my head around was that I would be spending my time with characters I either didn’t like or were so underdeveloped that it was hard to care about them, but then maybe that’s the point. Amidst the treacly black gunk that oozes throughout the housing complex and the ghastly assortment of characters there definitely a leaning towards appealing to a niche audience, maybe more towards those of an art-house leaning.

For anyone else HAUSEN will feel aimless, limited and rather muted. There’s aspects of it that reminded me of Lars von Trier’s THE KINGDOM and the Asian horror flick DARK WATER but otherwise I found this a lost cause. I did stick with it hoping that come its conclusion that I’d be enlightened but nah, it was not to be. As a friend of mine said about it, everyone is so unlikeable that you don’t really care if something nasty happens to them, in fact he said that he was desperately hoping that it would.

You can watch the trailer here