Housebound

A horror comedy from New Zealand. After trying to blow open a cash machine, Kylie is sentenced to home detention: eight months confined to her mother's house with a tracker on her ankle. Her mother Miriam talks constantly and believes the house is haunted. Kylie laughs at this. Then she starts hearing things herself. What works is that it takes both genres seriously at once: the horror is genuinely built and the comedy does not shrink it. The mother and daughter are not a joke either; that relationship is what actually gets repaired by the end. Amos, the security officer monitoring her tracker, is an amateur investigator interested in the supernatural, and the two of them start digging into the house's history. Gerard Johnstone wrote and directed, his first feature. Morgana O'Reilly plays Kylie and Rima Te Wiata plays her mother. The narrative changes genre halfway and the haunted-house story ties into something else entirely. A good discovery for anyone who likes horror and comedy running together. For a viewer wanting pure horror, the film keeps cutting the tension with jokes and its last section is almost entirely action.