Paperhouse (1988)

directed by Bernard Rose
UK
92 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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A lot of the people involved in this didn't go anywhere: its main actress never acted again, despite giving a fantastic performance here, and despite also directing Candyman and Immortal Beloved, Bernard Rose never made anything else of note, save for a modern-day Frankenstein adaptation that was so terrible it made me angry. It's unfortunate that this has to be viewed as a kind of cinematic isolate, but its influence on other films and the influences it took from other films mean that Paperhouse does at least live on in the realm of genre cinema as a whole.

It's interesting to see this widely interpreted as a coming-of-age film because to me, while I was watching it, it didn't seem like it was very specific about what age the protagonist was coming to or what exactly that entailed. It's mentioned that she's almost 11, she hangs out with a slightly older friend who she puts on makeup with, she mentions hating boys, et cetera; but all of this felt incidental. When you look at it more in-depth, though, there's a lot in here pertaining to how a child deals with adult issues- the titular house felt like a metaphor for a child trying to do adult things, for example. The house is mysterious and a little lopsided, it's cobbled together from what a kid imagines a "normal house" to look like, and it's something that the main character has to explore and figure out before she can begin to grasp how it works, like figuring out how to deal with autonomy and self-determination as you get older.

   

I was also very interested in how this film deals with childhood illness, and in fact I would go so far as to say that more than anything else, this movie is about childhood illness. Even though I never spent extended time in a hospital as a kid I felt like I knew the specific kind of hazy warmth and tiredness that the scenes where Anna is in the hospital conveyed: a feeling of comfort in being in a soft bed surrounded by cards and flowers but also anxiety at the same time, due to wanting to go home. Paperhouse as a whole has a vibe of taking place inside a bubble of childhood memory, something experienced once as a child and then possibly forgotten or re-contextualized as an adult.

   

Bernard Rose isn't opposed to using ambiguity to further the backstories of his characters, which is something I appreciated in this and also appreciated in Candyman. With that film, there are aspects of the killer's backstory that should be "impossible", but these facts don't preclude him from being a flesh-and-blood murderer anyway. And in Paperhouse, the fact that the majority of the action takes place during the main character's dreams doesn't explain it or make it have any less influence on the waking world. The lack of a drive to push things into little plot boxes and justify every act was a refresher from films that try too hard to ground themselves in reality in order to be scarier.