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Rating: Synopsis: a mother moves, with her two teenage daughters, into a new house (which belonged to their deceased aunt), an isolated house decorated in a macabre manner, with ancient and terrifying dolls scattered everywhere…
*This review contains spoilers*
Pascal Laugier is now a guarantee. And he has repeatedly shown that in his films, nothing is as it seems.
The house of dolls ("Incident in a Ghostland," the original title) opens like the most classic cliché, a mother dragging her two teenage daughters to a house in the middle of nowhere, full of creepy dolls ("it looks like Rob Zombie's house"); The candy truck that drives alongside them on the road, Vera's rude gesture to the driver, inevitably evokes the same gesture in "Nocturnal Animals."
In that ghostly house, we can guess what will happen, the tension between the two sisters makes us uneasy and Beth's first menstrual cycle is a macabre warning.
What happens in its way is predictable: the candy truck reaches the house, two men get out of it, attacking the three women, starting what might seem like a textbook home invasion, with a struggle to the death for survival. But in Laugier's cinema, nothing is as it seems, and soon we will realize that Beth's fight against the attackers goes beyond kicks and punches, it's all in her mind, and her ability to create plots and parallel worlds allows her, for a while, to escape the horror, when everything is too much.
Years later, Beth seems to have put that horror behind her, becoming a successful writer and building a whole family (while Vera wasn't so lucky in recovering from the trauma).
But there are clues about what is really happening, the incongruous elements in Beth's perfect life threaten to throw her back into the nightmare, from which she never really escaped.
Almost unbearable is the scene of Beth being dressed as a doll and "displayed" to the Ogre, handled like an object, sniffed. So, Ogre, do what you must and let's end this. Because the wait for what will inevitably happen is exhausting.
We are faced with an author's horror, a nightmare that renews itself: it stuns, freezes, and annihilates like only inexplicable violence can do.
In a house decorated with dolls, the dolls that give the film its title are the protagonists themselves, reduced to objects that can do nothing against their tormentors; After all, it matters little who the Ogre is (a brute who does not utter a word, merely growling and roaring) or the Witch (a man dressed as a woman who "prepares" the dolls to throw them to the Ogre), it matters little why they do it. Everything is just yet another shade of horror that needs no explanation.
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