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The House was reviewed a little less favorably than Bartas’ earlier films (regular cinemagoers having given up long ago), but personally I found it his most beautiful film yet.
Bartas does tend to repeat himself, it’s true. Reviewers love his grim shadowscapes, shot in B/W, of anonymous, more or less lonely, drunk or disheveled men and women stumbling through a haze of cold forests, smoky houses and city wastelands in seemingly arbitrarily fashion – but even they get, I assume, weary of it.
(Contrary to what you might think based on the above, there is nothing gothic about Bartas’ depressed realities; and he himself insists, whenever somebody dares suggest a socio-political interpretation, there’s nothing Soviet about it either. It’s existential. No matter, to me his ‘The Corridor’ still serves as a brilliant visual summary of the comfortless, hopeless human condition of the former Soviet Union).
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