JP Nunez
The restaurant business is in my blood. While I’ve never worked in a restaurant myself, my family has been in the industry since before I was born. My grandfather owned a great Italian place in Brooklyn, and several of my cousins have taken his recipes and opened up restaurants of their own. It’s almost like a family tradition, so when I first heard about House of Spoils, I was immediately intrigued. The movie promised to put a horrific spin on the hardships restaurant owners and workers endure on a daily basis, and as someone who’s seen a bit of that stress up close, I couldn’t wait to check it out.
House of Spoils was written and directed by Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy, and it stars Ariana DeBose, Barbie Ferreira, Arian Moayed, Amara Karan, Mikkel Bratt Silset, and Marton Csokas. The film follows an unnamed chef who works for a culinary bigwig in a fancy restaurant, and it’s finally time for her to escape her mentor’s shadow and make a name for herself. She quits her job and joins a restaurateur to open up her own place, but things don’t quite go as planned.
For starters, all the food in the restaurant seems to go bad right away, and the chef sees disgusting bugs in the most inconvenient and stomach-churning spots. Then, when it comes time to finally show the world what she can do, the stress of finally being the boss gets to her, and to make matters worse, the spirit of the building’s previous owner still lingers over the property. All of those obstacles threaten to derail this poor woman’s hopes and dreams, but no matter what happens, she’s determined to make it work.
When House of Spoils began, I was sure I was going to love it. From top to bottom, the acting in this movie is fantastic, so I had a great time watching every single one of these characters. Let’s start with the lead. The nameless chef is played by Ariana DeBose, and she imbues this character with a magnetic charm and likability. She just seems like a genuinely fun person to be around, so you can’t help but root for her to succeed.
Along similar lines, Barbie Ferreira plays a would-be sous chef with a friendly, bubbly personality that multiplies the fun, and Arian Moayed shows off an impressive range as the chef’s restaurateur partner. At first, he’s the kind of party animal you can’t help but love watching even though you probably don’t want to meet him in real life, and as the film goes on, Moayed adds some unexpected layers to the character.
Those excellent performances get House of Spoils off to an auspicious start, but unfortunately, the experience becomes a very mixed bag very quickly. For example, the movie is great when it focuses on the characters just doing their thing as restaurant owners and operators, but when the food starts going bad, the story starts to become a bit cringey.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t find moldy bread particularly scary, and we’ve seen bug infestations a few too many times for these particular creepy crawlies to be all that terrifying. The whole concept of a ghost spoiling a restaurant’s food simply isn’t compelling to me, so when that began to happen, I started to check out.
In contrast, when that witchy ghost starts to make its presence felt more directly, House of Spoils gets legitimately creepy. Writers/directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy use darkness and eerie imagery to craft some genuinely tense scenes, and there are even a couple of fun jump scares. Unfortunately, though, the balance eventually leans pretty heavily in favor of the more mundane frights, so these witchier moments can’t save the film.
In fact, by the time the credits begin to roll, even the good horror elements are rendered pretty ineffective. I can’t go into any detail without spoiling the movie’s surprises, but suffice it to say that the ending defangs a lot of what came before it. It retroactively saps the film of much of its spookiness, so as a horror movie, House of Spoils just about spoils itself.
On top of all that, this film also drops the ball thematically. It tries to be a metaphor for the hardships women face in male-dominated industries, especially the culinary industry, but it commits the cardinal sin of telling rather than showing. Some of the characters have a few conversations about how hard women have it, but I never really saw the chef being held back by sexism. I just had to take her word for it, and as any longtime movie fan knows, that’s not a recipe for success.
So at the end of the day, I’m sad to report that I didn’t enjoy House of Spoils. Sure, the film has a couple of redeeming qualities, like the excellent performances (especially Ariana DeBose as the lead character!) and the fun witchy moments, but the weaknesses handily outweigh those strengths. With lackluster scares and a weak thematic resonance, this movie is simply too much of a mixed bag to work, so if you’re looking for some good new horror to watch this Halloween season, I suggest you look elsewhere.
House of Spoils is set to hit Amazon Prime Video on October 3.
