Foodie television and film is having a bit of a moment, in no small part thanks to The Bear entering the zeitgeist surely, but also pulling in autuerist projects like last year’s Taste of Things from director Tran Anh Hung or Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros. And then there are the OG culinary fans who have been binging the likes of Chopped and Iron Chef for years, and have probably caught up with a number of the endless new derivations that pop up on streaming services seemingly monthly these days. House of Spoils, then, shouldn’t come as much of a surprise for viewers — horror, but make it look tasty. Ariana DeBose, most famous for her Broadway and film musical work (and that “Angela Basset did the thing” meme), stars as “Chef,” an ambitious young, well, chef. After working her way up through the kitchen of Marcello (Marton Csokas), an investor, Andres (Arian Moayed, fresh off Succession), invites her to open a new restaurant at a remote estate. Said remote estate has a dark history, however, as all remote estates seemingly do. From the beginning, everything Chef makes spoils quickly, and there are a number of creepies crawling around. But when she begins using ingredients from the former estate owner’s garden, her dishes are suddenly made miraculous. Eventually, we learn that the woman who owned the house, and who is featured in a particularly creepy photo, was a witch, and everyone who has tried to take over her kitchen goes crazy due to the presence of her ghost.
If all of that sounds thoroughly rote and headed toward predictable places, the rest of the plot won’t be much more enticing. Treading through a myriad of overly familiar horror tropes — the haunted estate, mysterious deaths, and a protagonist who’s increasingly isolated both mentally and physically — co-director/writer duo Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Kurdy have delivered a film both overcooked and under-seasoned. But it’s the film’s unwillingness to fully embrace either genre the directors are trying to blend together that ends up being its downfall. On one hand, House of Spoils clearly wants to take the shape of supernatural horror, with the ghost of the former estate owner slinking in to sabotage Chef’s success. But on the other, the film also wants to be a culinary drama about the cutthroat world and boiling-point stresses of opening a high-end restaurant. Unfortunately, neither aspect is sufficiently realized. The film’s requisite jump scares and eerie manifestations feel like afterthoughts, tacked on without much ingenuity or creativity in order to meet the Blumhouse brand’s genre expectations, while the culinary drama is patently stale when considered next to the spate of better chef-centric cinema viewers have been given in recent years. And on top of that, opportunities for the kind of character development that might enrich the film’s human focus, such as Chef’s relationship with her sous-chef Lucia (Barbie Ferreira), feel rushed and incomplete.
But perhaps the biggest misstep here is House of Spoils’ reluctance to fully lean into it’s more playfully absurd and camp elements. There’s the clear potential for some winking B-movie fun built into the film’s concept and even its script, especially in scenes where Chef outright dismisses the supernatural events: the moment she yells, “No more spooky shit!” before continuing about her day is a real treat, a glimpse into what the film might have been had it embraced the sillier, pulpier side of its premise. In the absence of a livelier touch, viewers are left only to admire the film’s modest but notable visual success, featuring an effectively creepy color palate and demonstrating some truly excellent food styling. But this aesthetic slickness isn’t enough to mitigate the film’s deficits. Ultimately, then, House of Spoils feels less like an abject failure than a missed opportunity. The supernaturalism is too pro forma, the scares too mild, and the psychological tension too shallow to leave much of mark. What could have been an exciting slurry of food and fear, grub and grue, is instead executed as safely as possible, leaving less a bad taste in one’s mouth than the simply sense that you’ve tasted this before, and it wasn’t particularly satisfying the first time. Forget Michelin Stars or even Bib Gourmand — House of Spoils is closer to Cracker Barrel.
DIRECTOR: Bridget Savage Cole & Danielle Krudy; CAST: Adriana DeBose, Barbie Ferreira, Arian Moayed, Amara Karan; DISTRIBUTOR: Prime Video; STREAMING: October 3; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 41 min.
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