In The House

Germain (Fabrice Luchini) is a literature teacher. It's the beginning of a new school year, with a new class full of students. Engulfed by lazy or talentless pupils, Germain is intrigued by the written assignment given up by Claude (Ernst Umhauer). In the essay, Claude writes about a fellow student, Rapha (Bastien Ughetto), and how Claude spent months sitting on a bench outside of his house. The new school year has arrived, and Claude decided to befriend Rapha and tutor him in maths, which finally gives him access to Rapha's home. Once inside, Claude begins to set up some very weird relationships with Rapha, Rapha's father (Inglorious Basterds' Denis Menochet) and mother (Emmanuelle Siegner).

The movie is telling a lot of stories all at once; the relationship between teacher and student, between lovers, between art and its audience, between opinion and fact, and asks some very interesting questions, especially once it shows us the potentially dark roads it can lead down. Germain brings the written assignments home to his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas), a struggling art museum owner, and even more conversations and questions arise between them as points of view and gender politics come into play.

The problem is that director Francois Ozon doesn't seem to really know what to do with all of these interesting ideas and questions, and he certainly doesn't provide us with much in the way of interesting resolutions or answers. Ozon has covered similar ground before with Swimming Pool, where he came up with a similarly weak conclusion. What's lacking is a sense of urgency, with the audience's want of knowing what happens next paling in comparison with Germain's. This is a shame, as leading up to this we get some genuinely great chemistry between the leads. What's more, young Umhauer is certainly someone Hollywood should snap up pretty sharpish.

In The House feels like a murder mystery without the murder, not so much of a whodunit as it is a what-will-he-do? It's entertaining, sure, but almost instantly forgettable.