Stream It Or Skip It: ‘House of Spoils’ on Amazon Prime Video, a Thriller Stirring Witches, Kitchen Drama and Ariana DeBose Into the Spooky Season Stew

Just a couple years ago, Blumhouse was cranking out stuff like House of Spoils ( now streaming on Amazon Prime Video ) on a regular basis, and really ramping up the output for spooky season (RIP the Welcome to the Blumhouse series – which produced an extraordinary Sidney Sweeney creeper, Nocturne – and Into the Dark ). Spoils might be a rung higher on the ladder though, considering it stars a bona-fide Oscar winner in Ariana DeBose ( West Side Story ), and is from relatively new-to-the-scene, relatively promising writer-directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy ( Blow the Man Down ). It also taps into the movies-and-shows-about-chefs trend and marries it to creepy feminist-witch tales, prompting us to wonder if a little eye of newt might make building a menu a little more inspired, both literally and metaphorically speaking.

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The Gist: Glimpses in the firelight: crone-ish looking women do ritualistic things around cauldrons, e.g., massaging bloody entrails like they’re kneading biscuit dough. Neat! CUT TO: a whole pile of high-end-kitchen cliches, complete with a highly demanding ego-chef, Marcello (Marton Csokas), yelling at his underlings to chop-chop with the sprigs of exotic greens delicately tweezered atop quarter-ounces of foam, and shit like that. The key cog in his machine is a character heretofore and forever known only as Chef (DeBose). She tells Marcello that she’s quitting to partner with a restaurateur on her own endeavor. He offers to double her salary to stay, but she holds true to her dream.

And boy, does her dream need a little elbow grease. She and her partner Andres (Arian Moayed, Succession ) acquired a long-vacant space upstate in the middle of BFE where they hope to build a destination restaurant where foodies with plenty of money and time will overpay for fancy bullshit. It’s filthy and there’s chiggers everywhere, but it comes with its own vegetable garden, and an uber-rustic vibe complete with its own witchy lore. Chef discovers the latter after she scrubs the place clean, but realizes she can’t leave bread dough out to rise without it being infested with bugs, or put anything in the fridge overnight without it getting incredibly moldy. Now, you’re surely wondering if any weird stuff, like doors opening by themselves, happens in this old dump, or if it features any heavily cobwebbed set pieces that need to be explored by very… slowly… walking… through them, preferably with minimal lighting. And I can answer definitively, yes, yes it does.

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Chef has a couple of helpers in Lucia (Barbie Ferrera, Euphoria ), an ambitious but underexperienced sous chef, and Alvin (Gabriel Drake), her toady and errand boy. There’s also a rabbit in the garden who likes to just hang out and wiggle its nose at her in a cute but slightly sinister fashion. A preview of the menu for snooty critics goes poorly, prompting Chef to wander deeper into the woods and discover a bizarre witch-garden chock-full of exotic ingredients she uses to develop a new series of incredibly earthy dishes. She also finds a recipe book full of stuff that almost certainly should be stirred in cauldrons, with, like, an eyeball or something floating to the surface. Around about this time is when Chef starts seeing things, and we aren’t sure if it’s supernatural strangeness or stress-induced hallucinations. It sure would be a pity if it wasn’t the former, wouldn’t it?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: House of Spoils uses some of the chefly food-snob stuff of The Menu and Pig and stirs it into a with folk-horror vibes borrowed from The Witch and In the Earth .

Performance Worth Watching: Credit DeBose for giving Chef a prickly sensibility to go with her ambition, but the screenplay ultimately fails the actress as it struggles to fully flesh out the character.

Memorable Dialogue: A convo about the fabled witch-lady, who’s a local myth-slash-legend around these here parts:

Alvin: I dunno, Chef. I wouldn’t eat anything from her garden.

Chef: You’ve been watching too many Tales from the Crypt , my dude.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: House of Spoils is a shallow bowl of soup when it should be a dense, hearty stew, and from here on out I’ll put the kibosh on the food metaphors. Cole and Krudy show considerable visual style and a proclivity for provocative and immersive set design. They also pack the film with compelling thematic fodder – earthy feminism, the pressures of cooking in high-end kitchens, the blessings and perils of ambition, the trappings of ego, the discordant clash of capitalism and creativity – and attempt to explore it within the confines of a workplace drama-slash-spooky thriller that flirts with being an elevated satire. This is a lot of stuff. Too much, as it turns out, and it never quite congeals as a robust drama, comedy or character study. The filmmakers’ ambition perhaps mirrors that of their protagonist, for whom things get rather messy.

There’s a scene deep in the film when Chef bellows, “No more spooky shit!”, and it’ll rankle you. More spooky shit might be exactly what Spoils needs, or at least a little more confidence to lean into the weirdness of this conceit, to make us feel something besides vague interest in the protagonist’s ability to pull off this endeavor – curiosity, maybe, for the fascinating melange of femininity and the occult that’s part and parcel for movie-witchhood, or repulsion towards Chef’s desire to attain the approval of snooty, assholish upper-crusters the likes of which The Menu and Triangle of Sadness speared and displayed on a pike. Cole and Krudy aim for a conclusion fueled by righteousness, but the result is muddled and confusing, and more than a little bit silly. The dish Spoils serves us looks good and is delivered with confidence, but upon tasting it, we ultimately found it dissatisfying.

Our Call: Sorry, I promised no more hacky food metaphors. Couldn’t help it. Maybe the movie cast a spell on me. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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