‘In the House” promises to be a social satire with a flash of Hitchcockian menace, but gradually it turns into a routine thumb-sucker on reality versus fiction.
The ever-brilliant character actor Fabrice Luchini and the ever-brittle Kristin Scott Thomas are a married pair frustrated by their attempts to have a meaningful relationship with art. He is a high school literature teacher who yearns to illuminate Flaubert for semi-literate students while she works in an art gallery that fails to excite the public with its would-be edgy displays.
Life becomes much more interesting for both of them when they start reading the stories of one of his students, Claude (Ernst Umhauer), who is using his class assignments to deliver a riveting running commentary on his relationship with the family of a dull-witted fellow student. Soon Germain (Luchini) is so caught up in Claude’s serial that he lies and even steals a math test to keep the tale going.
Director François Ozon, adapting a play by Juan Mayorga, initially keeps a pleasing balance of humor and suspense, leaving us guessing whether he’s heading for farce or thriller. Alas, the answer is neither, and the film trickles to a close without saying much except that storytellers can be tricky.