Spin off from TVD and it becomes definitely better than TVD itself.
Three stories that tell anxieties, obsessions and terrors about the relationship we have with the houses that we live in spite of ourselves.
The anxiety of the social status that our home symbolizes, which affects us only as adults, so we are willing to make a pact with the devil by sacrificing everything that has an emotional value for us and that tells who we are and where we come from replacing it with what has a recognizable value also by others, only by others, a purely materialistic value conceived as luxury for its own sake, a doll's house in which we force ourselves to live, until the loss of our authentic identity cuts off the bond with our closer affections and transforms us into part of the furniture as beings devoid of soul and meaning.
The obsession with success that makes us neglect taking care of ourselves in view of the goal, where the house we live in is a mirror and a metaphor of the mind we live in, both infested with parasites that feed on our life sending it upstream and making us slowly slip into madness because of our not remedying it systematically in time but moving forward by putting superficial patches that hide the discomfort that lurks beneath the surface.
The terror of becoming aware that it is time to turn the page, abandoning the idea of fulfilling the dream that has always haunted us and on which we fossilized and then marched, despite the fact that it is now evident to all those around us its impracticability. Terror that we can only overcome by accepting the surrounding reality that inexorably hampers (indeed, floods) our very hope at the foundations, making us realize that the building we have inhabited so far was not a real home for us but only a crossing of walls, inexorably discovered by a wallpaper that we would like would it to transform them into our house but that the surrounding world continues to detach from the walls, revealing the truth that we repudiate at all costs. Because our real home has always been the family bond that binds us to our friends who are housemates of our obsession, to whom until now we barely paid attention, distracted as we were by our futile intent, but who have remained close to us nevertheless, and with whom we will be able to start the journey into the uncertainty of the future towards a new home that will welcome us all. By realizing this, our obsession will turn into a healed trauma that will accompany us in the fog towards a new balance, giving us awareness of who we are and why we are back on the road.
An anthological film that exploits the setting of a house, probably cursed and inhabited in three different historical periods, the Victorian age, contemporaneity and the near future devastated by the imminent climatic catastrophe. Despite being a small manual on how to tell a horror story, based on the visual anticipation of disquiet and the slow growth of tension until the final climax, the first episode is the weakest of the trio because it is narrated by a character's pov not really involved in the choices that determine the plot but which she is only witnessing to, so that when it ends it seems that there is still something to say about this character or rather that this is a prelude to her personal story. The other two episodes are instead more successful, more centered around their characters, with the central one truly Kafkyan and surreal and the third more thoughtful and onhiric.
Animated in a technically stunning stop-motion, photographed even better with cuts of light that simulate the depth of field of open spaces, and with an attention to detail of the interiors that give credibility to the image enough to make you believe, especially in some moments of the second episode, of not looking at models but real live images, when this film ends you are left with the desire for other stories so well done.
