Smart House (2023)

Directed by John Oak Dalton [Other horror films: The Girl in the Crawlspace (2018), Scarecrow County (2019)]

There are some movies that have pretty solid ideas, or pretty solid stories, and the execution gets in the way of allowing the film to be all it can be. I don’t think that’s the exact case with Smart House – elements of the film were perfectly suitable – but as an overall package, I have to admit that I was hoping for a bit more, especially in regards to the finale.

The idea behind the film was pretty unique, though – an ASMR streamer (Iabou Windimere) is held hostage by her hacked smart house, and her father (Tom Cherry), a hacker, does what he can under his own limitations (he’s on house arrest after hacking into the Pentagon) to save his daughter.

It’s a movie very much entrenched in our modern way of life – while I myself have never seen, nor been near, a smart house, I imagine they exist, and on the back-end of the film, what with the father trying to help his daughter out, a lot of hacker terminology is thrown around, and it’s that portion of the film I found most unique. To be sure, hacking has been a thing for decades, but as someone who knows little about that subculture, it felt modern to me.

I have to say two things, first, before proceeding. One, I’ve never understood ASMR. I know it’s popular, and apparently has it’s fanbase, but I never saw the appeal. That said, I’m a big fan of letting people have the freedom to enjoy what they enjoy, so if you’re into ASMR, keep doing your thing, brahs. I also wanted to mention that I was sent an advanced screener of this film prior to it’s official release – now, I didn’t watch this until after the film screened in Chicago, but I wanted to be open about how I was able to watch this one.

Where Smart House shines is the story, I feel. Windermere’s character is staying at her father’s smart house (he designed the technology, but because of his house arrest, isn’t allowed to actually be around technology, so he got screwed over there) and has to deal with a potentially abusive ex. There’s a bit of mystery surrounding how exactly Cassandra (the name of the smart house technology – think SIRI, or whatever those fancy phone things are called) got hacked, and who hacked it, but it’s also true that there’s not necessarily a big focus on this.

When the smart house actually begins threatening Windermere, you’d hope that things get more tense, and to an extent, they do. Under threat from the smart house, she begins a livestream, reading, in her dulcet ASMR tones, portions of Revelation, and no, it doesn’t sound any less creepy being read that way. On a side-note, I’m not quite clear what actual harm the smart house could have done to her – sure, it can keep her locked in the house, but what can it actually do to hurt her? – but perhaps I missed something.

It’s during her live-streams that I have a couple of points that veer negative. For one, while she’s doing her thing, we get footage of people listening to the stream. Well, that’s what I’m guessing it’s supposed to be – we just see a bunch of young people looking at their laptops. We never see what’s on their laptops – well, we do once, and it just seemed like the guy was checking his emails, amusingly enough – and it seems very much like stock footage. I get the point, in that it showed the audience she had, but it rung rather false to me, and sort of took me out of the film.

Another thing, and this might be super nit-picky (but to be fair, I was super nit-picky when reviewing We Are the Missing, so at least I’m consistent), but it has to do with the comment section on the stream. She was getting anywhere from 60,000 to 900,000 viewers on her stream, and the comments were coming in just as slowly as always. I’ve used Twitch before, and I’ve watched live streams on YouTube – once you get upward of 300 viewers, you’ll be hard-pressed to keep up with the comments, even if it’s a follower-only chat (a function that Twitch allows). Sure, that wouldn’t make for easy reading in a movie, but realistically, there’s no way she’d not get hundreds of thousands of more comments.

One other thing I wanted to touch on, though I’m not quite sure how to. When the hacker father attempts to help out his daughter, he reaches out to hacker friends of his. I’m not clear how he does it – he plays an orphaned game he saved on a flash drive that apparently his hacker friends are always online on? It’s here that I need to fully state that I’m not a computer science guy. I don’t know a thing about how computers work, so naturally, I don’t know a thing about hacking. It probably makes sense, I just can’t understand that.

Regardless, though, once he’s talking to these hacker friends of his, we sort of get their avatars as each of them speak up. The whole screen becomes the avatar, and it just looks somewhat odd. Actually, I was reminded of some of the visuals from the beginning of Tales from the Hood 2, a comparison I don’t like making, because this film is overall far better, but that’s just what came to mind. I understood the point of doing it that way, but I just wonder if it couldn’t have been filmed in, or executed in, a better way.

As the lead, I do think that Iabou Windimere was mostly solid. She had a few shaky pieces of dialogue, and I still don’t exactly know what she had to physically fear from the smart house, but she was decent in the role. Far more interesting to me personally, though, was Tom Cherry. I praised Cherry in Scarecrow County, and I liked him here too. His character was an interesting one (and tragic, considering what he gave up to save his daughter), and he’s right when he says that it makes no sense to enjoy Jon Pertwee’s Doctor over Patrick Troughton’s (context may be necessary here, but I’m not getting into it).

Otherwise, there’s not much insofar as physical cast members. Erin Hoodlebrink pops up for a bit, and her scene is pretty fun (in part because she shares it with Cherry), but most of the other names of import provided only their voices. For instance, voicing the smart house, is Brinke Stevens, a legend of low budget horror (known for, among many other things, The Slumber Party Massacre, Nightmare Sisters, and Victoria’s Shadow). The performances aren’t the most important thing here, though they’re mostly decent.

The finale here felt somewhat anticlimactic to me. Honestly, it all comes back to the smart house. I still don’t quite get how the smart house could have harmed Windimere’s character. Even if I did get that, the fact that much of the action is a hacker talking to other hackers and then the main antagonist hacker (in a scene that just felt too vague for me), well, that wasn’t exactly ideal. There’s not really any more action toward the end of this film than we got early on, and that was disappointing.

I’ve said a lot here, but I think I can boil it down to some base elements. I liked much of the story, but the execution didn’t really do it for me. I would have preferred a bit more detail behind the individual who hacked into the smart house and why they did so, and overall, though I don’t think it’s a exceptionally poor film, I would have to say that I preferred Scarecrow County to this.

5/10