“I cannot even hint at what it was like, because it was a compound of everything that is impure, unwanted, abnormal and detestable.” This is how Lovecraft defined The stranger the true nature of the indefinable, of pure horror. Let’s say Caye Houses succeeds with his prodigious The dining room table to go one step further. Or further here, depending on how you look at it. The idea is to push the viewer’s resistance limit to the point of anguish. But leaving it to him and his imagination to reconstruct the horror in its pure state, if you will. The strategy seems close to genius. In a Gothic neighborhood environment so recognizable, so close, so ours and so, let’s face it, ridiculous as a house with gotelé walls, pre-IKEA furniture, paintings of deer and dining tables, a couple deals with the only thing they They never wanted to see, with what once seen it is impossible to continue living. It sounds mysterious and, in truth, it is infinitely more cruel because it is simply childish. And unbearable.
Houses and a cast of perfect actors make one of the most distressing nightmares that recent horror cinema has been capable of. On the exact limit between the sublime and the laughable; between tragedy and farce; between the fear of the unknown and the panic of the overly familiar, The dining room table It advances through the back of the gaze like a steamroller. Or a flamethrower. Pitiless. Every second hurts, every doubt despairs. And, meanwhile, hidden under the couch is the impure, the unwanted, the detestable, the simple dread. It is terrifying cinema, but also religious. Like religion itself, terror places the believer, the viewer, in proud acceptance of his helplessness. We are vulnerable when we admit the secret of faith, both fascinating and terrifying, and when we abandon ourselves to the overwhelming certainty of the unknown, of what makes us suffer. Amen.