The House on Laura Anne Dr. is an independent horror-thriller film set to release in 2024. Joseph A. Mazzaferro is the writer and director. The film features a young couple living in suburban Florida and pulls them into an experience that is deeply unsettling. It delves into isolation, fear, and the slow mental decay the couple faces. With a small cast and minimalist direction, the movie attempts a blend of supernatural and psychological horror, but ultimately fails at scaring or captivating the audience.
Plot Summary
The film’s main characters are a couple named Ava and Jay who are moving into a house on Laura Anne Drive. Jay has bought the house and hopes that they can start a new life in the home. Ava, while trying to adjust to the new home, feels that some things are off. The house has some unique features and strange occurrences start happening while she is alone in the house.
She hears noises at night and notices post-it notes appearing around the house with messages she doesn’t remember writing. The growing conflict reveals that she suspects someone has been living in their attic. Her husband tells her to calm down, and finally the frustrations of living in the house with her are too much to handle. One of the local policemen mentions that she worries too much, and calls the attic a no-go zone for emotions.
When her marriage with Jay takes a toll, she shares what she’s been going through with a friendly neighbor. Although Ruth shared interesting snippets of the house’s history that made her feel at ease, the opposite effect happened. Her emotions captivate her for the rest of the film. Rather than alleviating her worries, Jay’s lack of kindness and growing annoyance drives her further to blame him for everything going wrong in her life.
There are some moments filled with focus where the film allows for flexibility, and other moments where the suspension of disbelief is a curtain that needs to be lowered. My favorite moment is when everything falls apart, but there is add in that one moment of hope a big, honing explosion.
Performers with Their Characters
Natalie Brienen as Ava: Ava is the character whose emotional core the film revolves around. She is captured as weak and delicate, yet resolute. Brienen does her best to deepen the role, portraying a woman coming apart at the seams from the burden of fear and solitude. Brienen’s performance is the film’s strongest highlight and, despite the provided script offering scant material, her efforts were commendable.
Stephen Lamar Lewis as Jay: Jay is Ava’s husband, well-meaning but rather unsympathetic. He becomes a rather dull husband as he struggles to grasp any of his wife Ava’s concerns. The exhaustion he showcases over her worries reveals a chilling emotional aloofness masked as support.
Jann Van Dyke as Ruth: Ruth as a character is primarily a neighbor. She has the important role of giving exposition and context about the history of the house. Although her role is to soothe the tension, her character’s calm demeanor adds to the film’s undermining, chilling atmosphere.
Joseph A. Mazzaferro and Jason Henne have small supporting parts. Mazzaferro is also cast as the local police officer who minimizes Ava’s concerns, and Henne plays a character called Tony.
Themes and Interpretation
The film’s isolated psychological effects are the viewers’ and protagonist’s perspectives of the same frame. In the case of Ava, this manifests as time spent alone at home, away from her husband and surrounded by unfamiliar, puzzling happenings that strain her trust. This form of solitude, alongside emotional fragility, triggers the dual response of embracing her unreliability.
The overarching themes also intersect the topics of gaslighting and mental illness. These themes are evidenced by Jay, who time and again dismisses Ava’s fears as absurd, perpetuating the gaslighting. This depiction shines a critical light on the implausible mental health dynamics of a relationship wherein one partner risks detaching from the bond shared.
Although characters in this film give the impression of living in a haunted house, the viewers are offered a mix of fictional elements that are distinctive to both supernatural and psychological horrors. This leaves the audience to grapple with the silhouettes of the characters’ motivations: is Ava’s confusion rooted in reality, or does she merely project her strife? Unfortunately, the film remains teetering between confusion and frustration, poised on the spectrum of unresolve but void of suspension.
Direction and Style
Joseph A. Mazzaferro’s direction is quite simple, and it does not have any artistic elements or narrative suspense that would make the film more interesting. The cinematography has low light and uses common horror genre techniques like slow pans and wide-angle shots of hallways. However, none of these build towards effective scares. Instead of creating tighter tension, many scenes are so drawn out that they become repetitive and tiresome.
The film’s budget is clearly low, which shows in the set design and editing. Some cuts are clumsy, and the pacing is weighted down by slow scenes that do not add value to the story. The film seeks to replicate the atmosphere of more successful indie horror films, but sharp, witty dialogue and creative suspense are absent, making it difficult to maintain interest.
Pacing and Structure
The film is a bit more than 70 minutes and therefore has the potential to be fast-paced. However, it often comes across as sluggish. A good portion of the run time is dedicated to Ava exploring the house, reacting to changes, and becoming more anxious. Although it seeks to create psychological tension, the lack of climactic movement causes stagnation in the experience.
The house on Laura Anne Drive review
It’s The House on Laura Anne Drive’s attempt at a twist ending aimed at subverting viewer expectations which wraps things up far too quickly to piece reap to anything rewarding. Instead of resolving the previously posed riddle, it deepens the mystery – but not the type that fascinates.
The House on Laura Anne Dr has received overwhelmingly negative reactions, especially from horror fans and critics, who felt that the film was deficient in tension, creativity, and poor execution. While some liked the character-driven approach to the story instead of the usual focus on jump scares, the overwhelming consensus was that the story was not interesting enough.
As for the film’s praise, it was mainly for the acting, especially for Brienen’s. This praise was lost because of shallow characters and a story that squanders its psychological thriller premise. It was also criticized for relying too much on tired stereotypes, particularly the woman trapped in a haunted house, living in utter isolation devoid of any fresh perspective or suspense.
Conclusion
The movie The House on Laura Anne Dr. has a mix of psychological and supernatural themes that do not come together and has a lack of suspense leaving it forgettable. Laura Anne starts with a very promising setup and performance that is deeply committed from the lead. The movie does not deliver on genuine scares, emotional depth, or intrigue.
For the minimalist horror fans, the movie has a few moments of discomfort but overall it is far from minimalist horror that does not come together fully. With a lack of a strong script, depth in character development, and direction, The House on Laura Anne Dr. is a movie that is a fragment of an idea rather than a fully formed haunting.
Watch Free Movies on Sflix