The House brings dark animated tales of home ownership to Netflix

It may be hard for first-time buyers to get on the property ladder, but no matter how disheartened one gets, it’s probably best to turn down a free home if it’s offered to you by a cackling, nefarious architect in the woods.

That’s just one of the many bits of prudent advice one can glean from watching The House, a new collection of outré, stop-motion animated fables for adults that all take place in an eerie abode. Others concern sales (make sure nobody moves in during an open-house viewing) and renovations (bohemian handymen may steal your floorboards to construct a boat). 

It perhaps goes without saying at this point that the Netflix show — a collaboration between the award-winning Irish playwright Enda Walsh and the feted Nexus animation studio — is something of a curiosity. The House anarchically resists any neat categorisation by genre or style. Instead, it happily occupies the tenebrous corridors and liminal spaces between comedy and horror, art and entertainment, commentary and undiluted absurdity.

The changeable nature of the programme, in which the house and a pervasive uncanny atmosphere are the only constants, is largely down to the fact that each of the three half-hour tales has been developed by different directors, bringing their own style.

The first is a period piece that follows a family of black-eyed, macrocephalic humanoids who try to reclaim their long-faded nobility after the father (voiced by Matthew Goode) signs a Faustian pact which lets them move from their crumbling cottage into a grand mansion. It soon transpires that the house is possessed by the sadistic spirit of its designer, who toys with and tortures his residents.

Then, just as things arrive at a dramatic crescendo, the story ends, and the series moves from the sinister to the deadpan. We find ourselves with an anxious property developer (Jarvis Cocker) who, unusually for a rodent, toils to make the house more presentable for sale. In the way that fastidious attention to detail converges with some disarming visual gags, it plays out almost like a mini Wes Anderson film — one shot through with desperation rather than whimsy.

The last chapter — which revolves around a landlady and her hippieish feline tenants (literal cool cats, one played by Helena Bonham Carter), in a house left marooned by an ecological disaster — again brilliantly subverts expectations. Here, the look turns from nightmarish to oneiric; the humour becomes gentler and the emotions more sensitively handled.

It’s possible to see morals to these stories — the trappings of superficial materiality, the vanity of self-improvement — though perhaps better just to be swept away by the gleeful ambiguity and strangeness of it all. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but if you’re the kind of person who prefers an attic filled with cluttered gems to a meticulously curated living room, then this is one house well worth visiting.

★★★★☆

On Netflix from January 14