The House Was Not Hungry Then (2025) is the directorial debut of filmmaker Harry Aspinwall. It is filmed almost entirely within and from the perspective of a single house (located in Angus, Scotland); only the last scenes take us out of the house, although our perspective remains with it. The film is shot by means of static cameras located in several rooms in the house: the cameras don’t move and we get no alternating shots that give us any additional information than what we get in those fixed shots. Aspinwall describes the philosophy and composition of the film on his website:
“I wanted to do something different. I love the dry comedies of Ruben Ostlund and Roy Anderson, and the tongue in cheek morbidity of Edward Gorey. I started to think whether I could make a horror film following the same principles, of distance, of sparsity, of withholding, of brutal objectivity. No inserts, no reaction shots, nothing to tell the audience what to feel, just one single locked off wide for each room. What would that feel like, to be so still, so removed from the human life that wanders in, unsuspecting?”
Here’s the trailer for Harry Aspinwall’s The House Was Not Hungry Then:
The plot of The House Was Not Hungry Then – such as it is – involves a young woman Caroline Delgarno (Bobby Rainsbury), who wanders into the house looking for her estranged father. She and her father used to live nearby, but when she went home, she couldn’t find him. The film is in some ways “about” Caroline, who is struggling to “find” her father in more ways than one. He is physically not where she expects him to be; when she talks on the phone to someone about him, it’s clear he’s very ill – in a hospice (maybe); when she talks to her father on the phone, he does not seem to be completely “there”; and Caroline’s father has seemingly never been “there” in a different sense, as he and his daughter are estranged.
The above plot description perhaps overly humanizes the film, though, which is arguably more about the house than about Caroline. Indeed, it is the house we meet first and whose point of view we retain throughout. The House Was Not Hungry Then has been compared to Presence (Steven Soderburgh, 2024), which takes the point of view of a ghost inhabiting a house. The House Was Not Hungry Then is actually very different. The ghost of Presence retains human emotions and motivations: the house of The House Was Not Hungry Then does not. Aspinwall writes of
“exploring the idea of what would happen in this dispassionate space, and how the unseen presence would behave. A subtle but growing alienation, an omnipresent gaze; we are distant, objective to humans, but very close to something else.”
The point of view of the house
Aspinwall tries to capture the presence – the being – of a house. As he writes: “The character of the house, since there is no actor, no human performance interpreting it, has remained free, inhuman.” In this, The House Was Not Hungry Then is perhaps closer to the recent Good Boy (Ben Leonberg, 2025), which attempted to capture the perspective of a dog – a nonhuman point of view.
Check out our essay on Good Boy, the attempt to imagine the being of a nonhuman, and philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
I think Aspinwall’s attempt in The House Was Not Hungry Then works. The film is slow, undoubtedly – and anyone who expects a traditional horror film will be disappointed. The film is relentless in keeping us with the house: humans come and go and we don’t follow them when they leave or ever know much about them. Aside from Caroline, there is an ostensible realtor, an elderly man (Clive Russell), who brings people to look at the house – and some of them disappear, presumably “eaten” by the house, which is hungry now. The realtor seems to work to some degree in tandem with the house, as he is trying to preserve it from buyers who would gut it, tear it down – and from officials who want to put up council housing in its place.
Caroline draws a picture of the house, as part of her communication with it
As the film moves along, the house begins to communicate with Caroline, with whom it seems in sympathy. Both are alone, both are grieving lost pasts and lost people. Aspinwall makes the choice to have the house “speak” via text on the screen – a choice I wasn’t entirely sure about at first, but in the end I think it works. The house tells Caroline it learned from a young man who used to inhabit it. He was a musician and writer and brought vibrant life to the house: “he would speak his words aloud to try them,” and the house learned. And why wouldn’t a house absorb the life of those that inhabited it – just as we no doubt absorb something of the physical spaces we inhabit?
Indeed, it becomes clear that The House Was Not Hungry Then is interested in pulling human and nonhuman together. As Aspinwall writes: “Can you – like Caroline’s father – recognise yourself when the architecture of your body seems foreign, when you are just a gaze looking out from within?” The house does become something of a metaphor – for our own decaying, crumbling “architecture,” as Aspinwall puts it, for the tangible remains, the embedded memories of the past. The ending of The House Was Not Hungry Then – the last ten minutes or so – are in many ways the most interesting, as the point of view sort of shifts but doesn’t really. It remains with the house, but in a different form, which suggests the ways that everyone/thing – human and nonhuman – can move on without forgetting, move on rather than stagnate and decay. It’s an incredibly interesting ending – one of the more interesting I’ve seen in a while.
A poem plays over the ending – perhaps from the house, perhaps from the writer that once lived there and who meant so much to it:
“He cannot count the days and hours he spends / Nor say where he begins and architecture ends.”
Maybe we are all, in the film’s last line, “An old ghost in a new house.”
The House Was Not Hungry Then is available to rent or purchase on streaming platforms.
