Housewife is centered on Holly whose mother murdered her sister and father when she was seven. 20 years later and slowly losing her grip on the difference between reality and nightmares, she runs into a celebrity psychic who claims that he is destined to help her.
家庭主妇, Ev Kadını, 戰慄魔胎, 하우스와이프, Домохозяйка
France
L'Étrange Festival
Turkey
TBD
France
France
Turkey
🩸 Horror 🦑 Cosmic Horror 💎 Gem #148 (2017)
"Are you jealous, Val? Because that would be completely unfair. We shared our home with you. We shared our bed with you. I shared my husband with you. Then you have the nerve to be jealous of your new boyfriend and me, of your new family and me?"
Now here's an actual gem. Housewife is Can Evrenol's second feature-length film after Baskin, and it blew me away. I have no idea why it has only 2.8k views and the rating it does, because it is underviewed and very strong.
I'd have a hard time saying which I liked better, but I can tell you which was more gruesome and frightening: this…
Film #14 on my terrifying journey through Hooptober V.
Can Evrenol's Baskin was a surprise hit for me in 2016; a "let's give this a shot" random selection on Netflix that I knew nothing about (I didn't even realize it wasn't in English until after it started). What followed was a surreal, kaleidoscopic plummet into the ambiguous and grotesque. And a year later, I was anxiously awaiting the chance to see his follow up effort, Housewife, though sadly it'd be nearly another year before it would see a wide enough release to get my hands on.
Though I didn't find out mid movie, I was still surprised when I discovered that this time his film would be in English. The…
The English language debut from Can Evrenol might have faired better in Turkish or Kurdish, perhaps. But it's strength may be in it's dub-vibe, second language B-horror leanings. It wears it's influences proudly.
I'm going to go to bat for Housewife. This has a brilliant opening proving childhood is a real motherfucker. This truly is the era of B-homage and cosmic horror.
The dialogue has cringe on lock. Especially everything out of David Sakurai as Bruce O' Hara (yep). But the more I watched it the more I started to grin. This has a certain low-grade charm that works for me. I loved that canal scene.
Female centric in its psychological exploration and full of the proper amount of late…
Didn’t have me at first! Some of the seminar seemed really corny. But at one point I was hooked! The ending was really cool. Seemed the movie got better the longer you watched it! Very Trippy movie! Not for everybody!
I now realise why in a half asleep state did I turn the film off yesterday at night. Just like its central character, the lines between reality and experience started to blur and it got weird. While this is a cosmic horror film at heart, it does talk about trauma and the lasting scar it leaves on Holly who witnessed her sister being killed.
It is the sombre atmosphere that slowly starts creeping in as we get introduced to her husband and their friends -- all of whom speak in an awkward accent, which for a change, goes well with other stylistic choices. The performances are adequate if one doesn't really get fixated on their acting. There are plenty of…
Can Evrenol's Housewife is more restrained and more mainstream than his Turkish surrealist hellscape that is Baskin, making it a tiny bit underwhelming compared to it, but nonetheless offers about as much thrills and atmospheric visual horrors on its way to its bizarre finale. What made this less effective, though, was its muddled plot and at times predictable backstory, making its psychological angle of trauma and hypnosis a bit hollow. It's definitely not without depth, as there is some clear effort being put into the central characters' arc, but its in a way too overused and underdeveloped to make it fully work as a redemptive journey. For a lot of its runtime it's also a bit on the tame side,…
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What the fuck was this movie? Housewife is absurdly bad. By absurd I mean not a single thing that happens in this trainwreck makes any sense. Important characters are introduced without any sort of introduction. Sometimes I figured out who they were supposed to be, most times I was left wondering. The movie jumps randomly from setting to setting with no transitions and nothing close to a logical reason as to why they were switching. At one point they start doing the spooky version of Inception dream jumping for no reason that is explained or even hinted at. It was at this point in the movie that I lost it and just started cracking up at this mess.…
Like Baskin, Can Evrenol's follow up Housewife meanders a bit through its second act, but its resolution ties everything together through a nightmare logic that makes it less overtly provocative than his debut, and more of a piece with the development of the central character. In other words, Evrenol is growing as a filmmaker without sacrificing the whims of his Id - a much needed, surrealist horror artist, and a true disciple of Jodorowsky, well on his way to making his masterpiece. And I can't wait to see it.
NIGTMARES OF A FILICIDE
First 20min of Deep Red stretched thin like silly putty
Dragged across a pair of red shoe diaries
And tossed through the 7th door to hell
Turkish Winona Ryder, fruit roll-up, Eraserhead then worms in the sky
Shady self-help dystopia about a traumatized Clementine Poidatz as Holly O'Hara who witnessed something horrific when she was still a child. Can Evrenol, the director, quite deftly mixes that gruesome memory with a kind of Rosemary's Baby situation in a cult lead by a self-help guru psychic played by David Sakurai. The cult is named Umbrella of Love and Mind or ULM with admirers filling an event hall for Sakurai. The guy is a pretty good mix of cult and evil kind of like Jim Jones. This was close to being down my alley, with the opening childhood memory scene and some threesome going on with Poidatz, her friend Alicia Kapudag and Ali Aksug as Timucin, Poidatz' husband and kind of well-known writer. There might be too much going on thematically but things bleakly come together.
#50 - Take your pick from Asian Horror Challenge 2023
Progress: 15/61
"Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome... the family members!" (?!)
Much like "Baskin", Housewife (also from Can Evrenol) was another movie that I was curious about, so it was a "natural" pick for me to add it to the challenge ^_^
Definitely a weird, quirky one. (again, not your regular "cup of tea" lol)
Two aspects came to mind.
I thought the 1st half of the movie was, despite it's striking beginning, quite vague and a bit draggy. I'm pretty sure it could've been shorter (and the movie is short :S).
It might've just been me but the leading actress (Clémentine Poidatz) just felt like an awkward cast selection…
