The House of Yes

A film set in one house in America. Thanksgiving. A hurricane is outside and the power will go. Marty comes home. He has a girl with him. Lesly is his fiancée. She works in a sandwich shop and does not know this family at all. His mother is in the house. So is his twin sister. The sister's name is Jackie. Everyone calls her Jackie-O. She is ill. She has just come out of an institution and is on medication. She has an obsession: the Kennedy assassination. She wears the same dress, does the same hair, and tells that day over and over. From there the film lasts one night. A sitting room, a kitchen, a few bedrooms. The mother does not like Lesly. She makes it plain at once. The younger brother Anthony is there too. He has been thrown out of university and is interested in Lesly. The talk opens by degrees. The family is hiding something. What is hidden is the relationship between Marty and Jackie. Jackie will not accept that it is over. What the narrative is interested in is not a family secret but repetition: its idea is that an event is re-enacted many times in this house, and that the re-enactment has taken the place of the thing. The assassination has become a game. Two people play that day again and the pistol is real. The tone is black comedy. The dialogue is fast, sharp and entirely theatrical. The structure is one location. The source is Wendy MacLeod's play and the film hides it not at all. Parker Posey won a special jury prize at Sundance for the part. Parker Posey, Josh Hamilton, Tori Spelling, Freddie Prinze Jr. and Geneviève Bujold are in the cast. Mark Waters directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes black humour and single-location stage adaptations. Who it is not for: anyone who does not want to be unsettled; the subject is incest outright and the narrative carries it in a joking tone.