Germain is a French teacher who is frustrated with the work of his students, with the exception of shy Claude and his almost voyeuristic writing gifts. Both disturbed and fascinated by Claude’s essays about secretly entering the home of his classmate Raphael, Germain encourages his star student’s storytelling and the assignments steer increasingly out of control… Kristin Scott Thomas and Emmanuelle Seigner star in the new film from French auteur François Ozon (8 Women, Potiche).‘Ozon methodically crafts a chilling, crystalline thriller.’ (Toronto Film Festival)
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In the House was inspired by Spanish play The Boy in the Last Row by Juan Mayorga, Director François Ozon explains the appeal of the play as the inspiration for his thirteenth feature film:
‘I was particularly struck by the teacher-student relationship when I read the play. We root for both the teacher and the student. Both points of view are presented, by turns. Usually students learn from their teachers, but here, the learning goes both ways. And the back-and-forth between reality and writing lends itself to a playful reflection on storytelling and the imagination. When I read the play, I saw a chance to speak indirectly about my work, the cinema, inspiration and its sources, what it is to create, what it is to be an audience. The play is a continuous stream of dialogue. There are no acts, no truly contained scenes. The locations are not specified or differentiated, we’re everywhere at once: the classroom, the art gallery, the house, the park. My first job was thus to create a space-time structure, organize the story in terms of time and location. I eliminated and simplified a lot of things, and the fundamental question was how to represent Claude’s writing. The first instalment is read in its entirety by Germain. The second instalment is visualized and commented in voiceover by the narrator, Claude. As the film progresses, there is less and less voiceover. Dialogue and images take over, it’s cinema.’
