House Of Spoils' restaurant horror is more rotten tomato than Michelin star
A haunted farm-to-table restaurant plays with its pulpy food in the silly, slight horror tale.
Photo: Prime Video
As The Bear regularly commits category fraud to pass off its boiling-over stresses as comedy, House Of Spoils throws an extra ingredient into the heart attack atmosphere of high-end kitchens: a ghost. The haunted restaurant horror tosses plenty into the pot, but the half-developed flavors rest uneasily on the palate. In their second film together, writer-directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy (Blow The Man Down) serve up a clashing menu featuring both pulpy campfire-tale marshmallows and the Michelin-chasing dishes of a spiraling, hubristic chef.
That unnamed chef (Ariana DeBose) leaves behind her hardass boss (Marton Csokas) in order to partner with douchey restaurateur Andres (Arian Moayed) on their own place. But it’s not a trendy farm-to-table spot yet. Rather, it’s an overgrown gamble, more likely to be staffed by the baby-cooking crone from The Witch than a refined maître d’. The move to the middle of nowhere is haunted by red, smoky dreams—auguries of boiling, toiling trouble to come. House Of Spoils yearns to add its own spice to these cauldron-bound conventions, just like it wants to comment on the patriarchy (by its central women paying lip service to the culinary boys’ club, among other loose threads), but there are too many cooks in its kitchen, each with their own take on what this movie should be. The result is too serious to ever go full B-movie bonkers and too silly to ever actually scare, let alone say something meaningful.
DeBose’s ambitious chef has enough on her plate when she crashes at the rundown country home, a Blumhouse version of the idyllic estate in The Taste Of Things. The property is shot handsomely enough by cinematographer Eric Lin (especially a shed festooned with herbs), who helps the cuisine look just as classy. But food porn becomes a food snuff film as the dark force lingering on the estate reveals one of its powers: The chef’s preps instantly mold, her new garden rots, her fresh loaves teem with bugs. It’s icky enough, even though nothing in the film is as tangible as accidentally grabbing something squishy from the back of the fridge. Stuck with last-minute supermarket groceries, an inexperienced sous-chef (Barbie Ferreira), and an uncooperative specter, a demo meal to impress investors turns into an impromptu Halloween episode of Chopped.