★★★
Home Bodies is a handsome, superbly acted sealed-room puzzle about twins raised by a voice behind a locked door, that promises much and delivers… something.
The mysterious sealed room is a recurring laboratory in genre cinema, from the lethal geometry of Cube to the domestic claustrophobia of Await Further Instructions and last year’s Brick. Casey Walker’s Home Bodies belongs to that lineage, and it stands on two things: the bond between its two siblings, and the mystery of the dwelling itself.
An opening tracking shot glides through a dim, bunker-like interior and settles on two infants, one swaddled in red, one in blue. A cut delivers them a dozen years on as Red (Emma Ho) and Blue (Ian Ho), still enclosed in the automated dwelling that turns out to be the film’s only setting. Provisions appear in the fridge on request and transform in the microwave. Videotapes of a puppet show arrive unbidden. Their vocabulary has hardened into private usage, catch becoming “ball catch”. Order comes from Papa, a disembodied voice behind a locked door with a glowing window. They are not allowed through: Blue bears the cost of an attempted transgression in a scar on his hand.
The mystery is what holds the attention: where is this dwelling? What is Papa? Where does refuse go when it vanishes from the foot of the cellar stairs? What lies beyond the front door?
On the forty-second Noël (they apparently get one every month) the pair are given a special gift – Pal (Ess Hödlmoser), an androgynous, wordless presence they are told to look after. Red calls Pal her; Blue calls Pal it. That grammatical split then grows into a chasm between the children before either has done anything irrevocable.
When Blue arranges a plan to get rid of Pal, he’s left holding a dark secret, becoming more deranged as the strain deteriorates his sibling bond. The intimacy of two people who have only each other slowly evaporates. The Ho siblings are excellent throughout, and Chareese Steinhoff’s production design stays tactile and strange; a sequence in which Red is swallowed by a maggoty pile of garbage is the one passage to reach outright horror.
Sadly, the resolution offers up a version of what audiences were probably guessing was outside the door without giving us much in the way of details or real clarity, dispelling the dread without accounting for it. Nicely styled, finely acted and finally hollow, Home Bodies is all promise and not quite enough delivery.
Home Bodies played at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal