The House is a 2022 British stop-motion animated anthology film written by Enda Walsh and telling different stories forming a trilogy spanning different worlds and characters but set inside the same house. Each story deals with themes of madness, wealth, and the pursuit of true happiness.

Originally announced as a television miniseries, it became an anthology film. Produced for Netflix by Nexus Studios in London, it tells three stories respectively directed by the duo of Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, and Paloma Baeza; the directors are credited with the story of their respective segments, with Johannes Nyholm as co-writer for the second.

I – And heard within, a lie is spun

• Mia Goth as Mabel
• Claudie Blakley as Penelope
• Matthew Goode as Raymond
• Mark Heap as Mr. Thomas
• Miranda Richardson as Aunt Clarice
• Josh McGuire as Uncle Georgie
• Stephanie Cole as Great Aunt Eleanor
• Barney Pilling as Mr. Van Schoonbeek

II – Then lost is truth that can't be won

• Jarvis Cocker as the Developer
• Yvonne Lombard as the Odd Wife
• Sven Wollter as the Odd Husband. This was Wollter's final role prior to his death.
• Bimini Bon-Boulash as Police Officer #1
• Ayesha Antoine as Police Officer #2

III – Listen again and seek the sun

• Susan Wokoma as Rosa
• Helena Bonham Carter as Jen
• Paul Kaye as Cosmos
• Will Sharpe as Elias

The House was first announced in January 2020, with the anthology being produced at the London unit of Nexus Studios for Netflix. Nexus had three director teams lined up to tell a tale of three distinct family generations at the same house:^[1] The duo of Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, and Paloma Baeza; the directors are credited for the story of their respective segments, with Johannes Nyholm as co-writer for the second. At the 2021 Annecy Film Festival in June, the key voice cast was announced for each story.^[2] In November 2021, the first images of the anthology were revealed along with the release date of 14 January 2022.^[3] The first trailer was released in December 2021.^[4][5]

Nicolas Ménard and Manshen Lo co-created the hand-drawn, 2D animated title sequence.^[6]

The project had originated at a meeting at producer Charlotte Bavasso's London home, where the four directors "brainstormed a bit and came up with this idea about a house in which different things are happening in different times. We agreed that we would each have our own separate chapter, but still with connections to each other," according to von Bahr. Later, "We chatted a lot over Zoom and helped each other with script development and character design, everything. All of us were quite new to such an upscale project, so I think this was a perfect arrangement. You had your own film, but you didn't feel alone."^[7] Bavasso, said Baeza, "brought us together and we talked about stories and characters that we were interested in, and we tried to find overlaps, which is a completely unique experience. You never get to work with filmmakers or creatives in that collaborative way where you are each doing a separate film, but also sharing lots of ideas."^[8] The directors wrote detailed story outlines, and then Irish playwright Enda Walsh wrote all three segments' dialog in collaboration with them.^[9]

Roels said his and Swaef's opening segment came from the desire to tell "the story of the house before there was a house, the origin story, so to speak. I had been reading a graphic novel by Richard McGuire called Here, in which you see a corner of the world and how it changes through millennia. You see it as farmland, and when it was inhabited by Native Americans, and before that when there were dinosaurs. And then suddenly you're in the 1950s and someone's vacuuming the floor. And it kind of sparked off an idea, like what was there before the house?"^[10]

Each of the three segments required more than 20 weeks to produce.^[9] Except for the Busby Berkeley style dance number in the second segment and the mist and some water effects in the third segment, almost all the animation was done "in camera" without greenscreen or digital compositing.^[9] Jarvis Cocker wrote and performed the song that plays over the closing credits.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 97% of 36 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.40/10. The website's consensus reads: "Whether you're a fan of stop-motion animation or just looking for something deeply, alluringly weird, The House will feel like home."^[11] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 71 out of 100, based on 10 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.^[12]

Dmitry Samarov of the Chicago Reader said the movie "sustains its momentum by varying the styles of storytelling and rarely stooping to either crassness or cutesiness. ... Each story is directed by different people with obviously separate ideas and inspirations; this heterogeneity moves the film along without ever letting it overstay its welcome. Yet the unifying elements of setting and the charmingly old-fashioned stop-motion animation keep it from flying off in a million directions."^[13]

Lucy Mangan in The Guardian gave the movie 3 out of 5 stars. She said the first segment is "by far the most successful of the trio," and that the second was "too underbaked to deliver any real horrors or work as a fable about violation, or capitalism or any of the other themes it seems at various moments to be nodding vaguely at." She said the third was "a very, very slight affair," and that overall, "If the content of the stories had matched the painstaking form, the anthology could have been rather a groundbreaking success."^[14] But Noel Murray of The A.V. Club said of that second segment that, "All of The House is worth watching—especially for animation buffs—but for those who can handle a hefty helping of grotesquerie, von Bahr's segment is the one can't-miss."^[15]

Nick Allen at RogerEbert.com said, "With its rising directors each employing a surreal style, it creates a rich balance of ethereal, existential storytelling with stop-motion animation that's so detailed and alive you can practically feel it on your fingertips", and that it "proves to be a consistent anthology, in that it's always just about the same level of surreal, playful, sadistic, and entertaining".^[16]