Intensity 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Written and Directed by John Valley
American Dollhouse is what you get when a slow-burning liminal horror film decides to step on the gas and slams you into psycho murder madness. Sarah is a woman who hasn’t been given many breaks in her life. When she inherits her dilapidated childhood home, she thinks she has struck the lottery. Unfortunately, the house retains awful memories, and worse yet, has a psychotic neighbor who has a strange obsession with her. Tensions rise as the neighbor’s behavior escalates into violence, pushing Sarah deeper into a nightmare that threatens everything around her.
Like an actual dollhouse, American Dollhouse will draw you in with the little details. Liminal horror has become an expanding trend in indie horror. Consider the audio subtleties of Undertone. Or the jarring, lingering shots of Skinamarink. Also, the quiet modern folk horror of Rabbit Trap. All of these films draw your attention to an object and ask you to patiently wait to see if something dramatic will happen. There is a certain languid style to these types of films. They are clever, subtle, and build slowly to a final crescendo.
American Dollhouse asks the audience similar things. Did you notice that extra kid in the photograph? Why is there a lingering shot of the water pump? This pump carries dreadful memory. Plus, you will learn that it also relates to the photograph you might have noticed earlier. If you pan over a window frame with nothing in it, will something show up? No? OK, pan to the next window. Now? And… BOO! Psycho staring through the window!
The movie has that slow-burning philosophy in the first act. The side benefit is that you learn a lot about the characters, and they all deliver strong performances, and you get to spend time with them. Eric’s rule #1: Do I care if bad things happen to the protagonists? Yes. American Dollhouse delivers flawed protagonists whom you can root for. And then… the movie accelerates in the second act and gets really aggressive in ways that most liminal horror movies don’t. Here’s what I like: a first act that sets the table for the character and situation, and a second act that lights that on fire. The third act provides a terrifying situation worthy of the great slashers of old. (Think Texas Chainsaw)
The Cast of American Dollhouse
- Hailley Lauren plays Sarah, a woman who, chased by a family tragedy and substance abuse problems, finds hope in the form of inheriting her mother’s home, even if it is a wreck.
- Kelsey Pribilski plays Sandy, Sarah’s neighbor. She initially appears to be on the spectrum. Odd, and obsessive, but her reputation in the neighborhood is that she’s eccentric. Unknown to the neighborhood, though, her mind has been warped by a tragedy that claimed her entire family.
- Tinus Seaux plays Michael, Sarah’s older brother. Michael thinks Sarah is being immature and has some old resentments due to the shared family tragedy. (That’s a common theme!)
- Danielle Evon Ploger plays Avery, Sarah’s best friend and confidant.
- Richard C. Jones plays Rick, a neighborhood handyman who does lawncare AND pizza delivery. He and Sarah have quick positive chemistry.
A Synopsis
Sarah and Michael review their old childhood home after their mother died a month ago. Their mom left the house to Sarah, but it’s in rough shape. There is a gaping hole in the roof covered by a tent. Michael wants Sarah to sell the house because it would cost a fortune to fix, and it symbolizes the state of their family. It’s barely holding together. But Sarah sees the possibilities and feels she is owed a karmic win. While they are arguing in the front, Sandy arrives looking for “Mrs. Green”. Sandy is a hot mess. She’s in a ratty pink sweatshirt, her complexion wan, perhaps covered in scabs. She reminds Sarah to put up the Christmas lights and mow the lawn. That’s what Mrs. Green would do.
We learn that a horrible tragedy happened when Sarah and Michael were children. In order to avoid going to jail, their mom pinned the incident on Sarah, and she has been living with this burden her whole life. Sarah held onto the truth for a long time, but it cost her reputation.
Sarah tries to settle into the house, practicing yoga, smoking from a bong, and enjoying her vibrator, when she catches Sandy spying through her uncurtained windows. This sends Sarah into a frenzy, and she threatens Sandy, demanding that she stay away from her house. To try and ease the tension, she invites Avery over for pizza and booze. When Rick shows up (They met earlier about mowing the lawn) with pizza and beer, the three of them throw an impromptu party. Unbeknownst to them, Sandy has made her way onto the roof, waiting in ambush with a cinder block.
Uh oh!
Sandy intends to rebuild her family (who are still corpses in her house) and wants to use Sarah, who looks a lot like her mom, and Michael to be her dad. Everyone else is in the way and is a bad influence on Sarah. The veneer of the eccentric but harmless Sandy was a facade. She is an uncorked bottle of madness, now triggered by the presence of Sarah.
Evaluation of American Dollhouse
This is a bold first feature for John Valley. The story is fairly straightforward, but it is bolstered by strong back stories and layers of meaning. There are paired symbolic circumstances in play, and the writing connects the threads well. Both Sarah and Sandy have gone through brutal family tragedies where their mothers were the source of their trauma. That Sandy sees her mother in Sarah (validated by a picture in Sandy’s Home) pushes the stories closer together. I like that Sarah is a bit of an unreliable narrator, but once you put the story together, she is a tragic heroine. Her circumstances have also clearly given Sarah a stiff spine. She has been hardened by having to fend for herself. The relationship between Michael and Sarah is also understandable. This is a well-written story with many layers and nuances.
Both Hailey Lauren and Kelsey Pribilski are terrific in their mirror roles. They are both pathetic in their own way and oddly noble. These are tortured souls. They are both stubborn. One has been trying to cope. The other is completely broken. Also, the final act showdown between the two of them is one for the ages. The further symbolism of Sandy playing “Dolls” in her dollhouse adds additional symbolic texture. She clearly is not handling trauma well.
What the film struggles with a bit is the pacing, however. I enjoyed it, but I know some audiences may become impatient with all the backstory and character-building in the first act. It is dialogue-heavy and has a languid pace that draws your attention to the story elements it wants you to discover. Fans of liminal horror will love this. Others, not so much. When it accelerates into full slasher mode, the violence comes HARD. Much harder than most liminal horror movies. So the effect is a bit jarring. I found it akin to a rollercoaster, which climbs and then drops you off the big drop.
A minor quibble is that the cinematography is a little flat. It has a desaturated feel about it. An exception is the dollhouse model, which was effectively used as a symbolic transition and the opening sequence. The gore effects worked really well. The jump scares were pretty potent, too. Good horror fundamentals.
Concluding thoughts:
John Valley wrote a nicely layered story with overlapping symbolism and found a cast that could execute these characters very skillfully. American Dollhouse had its world premiere at SXSW and a follow-up at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, which is still in progress as of this writing. That is historically a good one-two combo for validating a horror film’s quality. This is a great opportunity for First-time indie directors to build buzz for their films. Last year, it was Good Boy, Redux Redux, 30 Acres, The Ugly Stepsister, and It Ends for indie horror films with first-time feature directors, and they were all special films.
This ongoing Golden Age of Horror films really benefits from the festival circuit. The studio franchises still bring in the money, but this is where the new soul of horror comes from. I hope that John Valley has more good stories in his brain, and that he continues to ask us to see the little elements through his camera work.
I believe American Dollhouse is still seeking a distribution partner, so a wide-release or streaming date has not yet been announced. This is not a rated film, but it would certainly earn an R rating for gore, violence, language, and drug use. This doesn’t feel like a movie pitched to teens, but teenage horror fans could probably handle its level of nastiness.