Open House
2019 · 18m
Directed by Philip Aceto
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A school janitor, picked on by students and undercut by staff, lashes out in petty and cruel ways, in a drama about a complicated, hard-to-pity protagonist.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone wants the janitor to be sympathetic, so Aceto just... doesn't give it to you—he makes you watch someone petty and small inflict pettiness on people smaller still, and somehow that refusal to comfort us is more honest than any redemption arc could be.
The film locates itself deliberately in the tradition of character studies that refuse easy moral positioning, working within the austere grammar of institutional drama to examine how hierarchies calcify and deform everyone they touch.
There's a moment where the camera holds on the janitor's face just a beat too long after a cruelty—not to judge him, but to let us see the exhaustion underneath the pettiness—and that single choice of restraint transforms the whole film from sociology into something human.
Reviews
Open House is instead in many ways the inverse of that premise. It focuses our perspective to that of the aggressor, in a gripping scripted drama that borrows elements of cinema vérité in its execution.
It's easy to understand why such a man would lash out and yet it's just as hard to feel bad for him because of the petty, misogynist, and even racist attacks he bestows on others. As the camera follows the janitor's every move, we as viewers get to experience his alienation and resentment in a deeply unsettling and personal way that gives way to waves of empathy for him despite his obvious flaws.