It starts innocuously enough. “Krazy House,” the English-language debut of Dutch filmmakers Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil, launches with a ‘90s family sitcom parody that ribs their cheese and cringe. Complete with the laughter of a live studio audience, a religiously-minded family — aptly named the Christians — goes about their business while their klutzy patriarch, Bernie (Nick Frost), bumbles and fumbles about. He even comes complete with a punny catchphrase, “cheese ‘n’ rice,” to quench his blasphemous outbursts.
READ MORE: Sundance 2024: The 23 Most Anticipated Movies To Watch
But then the frame starts to glitch, shifting from the boxy television ratio to a cinematic widescreen. The illusory magic of the fake world begins to collapse with the strange arrival of a Russian contractor, Piotr (Jan Bijvoe), and his two sons to fix a household leak. But these visitors trample the welcome mat, insidiously taking over the home as their repairs give way to an insatiable appetite for destroying the structure entirely.
The fake sitcom within “Krazy House” already showed some signs of slippage before the Russian invasion. A character breaks ever so slightly at Bernie’s antics in an early scene, indicating that the players’ investment in this illusion is hardly ironclad. But once these flashes away from the main action to a distressed Bernie begin, the film’s internal logic breaches irreversibly and irreparably.
There’s cinematic misdirection when it comes to toggling between different realms of reality, and then there’s outright miscommunication. “Krazy House” is the latter, offering its viewers no grounding through its increasingly gonzo descent into violent mayhem. Steffen & Flip, as the directing duo dubbed their creative partnership, provide no context as to who and what the figures on screen represent. Are they characters? Actors? Real people? What’s the role of the audience? Or the crew making the production possible? As the set descends from a filming zone to a war zone, withholding that information proves a fatal flaw.
“Krazy House” becomes a race between the film and the filmmakers as to which can fall apart most rapidly. They both win, and the audience loses. Not since Darren Aronofsky’s “Mother!” has a film charted a house’s decline into outright decay so unblinkingly. But each non-sequitur plunges the film further into outright nonsense. The intent of scenes and story beats become downright unreadable as Steffen & Flip veer wildly between humor and horror.
All that knowledge of sitcom form and function serves little good for “Krazy House.” Steffen & Flip belabor their archetypal characters, relentlessly hitting one note to the point of exhaustion. The sight of a mulleted Russian boy around her age is enough to transform sheepish daughter Sarah (Gaite Jansen) instantly into a boy-crazy frenzy, while a similarly skeevy visitor flips chemistry-curious son Adam (Walt Klink) into a druggie. And the beleaguered matriarch Eve (Alicia Silverstone) … well, the actress gets to do a lot of whining and moaning as an existence she openly despises begins to rapidly deteriorate around her. Unintentionally, Eve makes for a great audience surrogate.
Bedlam comes to feel banal as the film’s only guiding light seems to be its shitposting “LOL nothing matters” attitude. The filmmakers clearly have a bone to pick with the posturing, pious Christians — both the sitcom family and the faith as a whole. If there’s anything that comes close to resembling a target of satire in “Krazy House,” it’s the passive conservatism of these structures exalting the traditional nuclear family. But without any aim, their critique is little more than an unfunny joke that culminates in the stunt casting of E from “Entourage” (Kevin Connolly) as Jesus Christ himself.
Bernie’s internal tussle with his faith suffers from the same confusion as the rest of “Krazy House.” It’s neither funny nor frightening as it careens between allegory, absurdism, and anarchy. Steffen & Flip cannot decide if his ultimate indulgence in protective violence constitutes Bernie abandoning his beliefs or fulfilling what they view as his religion’s hypocrisy. The filmmakers take glee in watching the character squirm, a pain they are all too happy to pass along to any watching him flail.
It’s unclear if Steffen & Flip believe in a hell for their characters. But their 85-minute torture device disguised as a movie proves they believe in one for their viewers. Not even cheese ‘n’ rice can save this dismal enterprise from doom. [D]
Follow along for all our coverage of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.