Every once in a while Hollywood tries a new variation of the haunted house genre, and every once in a while, it works. This is not one of those times. The movie starts out with a flashback with a doctor doing lobotomies when one of his patients escapes and kills the doctor. The orderlies then take him out, stage a murder scene and burn the evidence in the hospital crematorium. Jump to the present and we get into the real movie; actress Inbar Lavi plays Emma, a new student at Eastern Connecticut State University. Her roommate, Gabby, introduces her to Colt and Dylan and take her to a burning trashcan party in the vacant front property in front of the abandoned Redding Home Asylum. In time, we learn Emma is psychic, although she has been using medicine to drown out the voices for years. When she is drawn into the hospital by the voices of one of patients killed at the start, her friends follow her inside but accidentally knock over a shelf with the forgotten canisters holding the ashes of the three cremated in the prologue. The spirits of the three patients infest the three as a result - Colt becomes psychotic, Dylan develops Intense OCD and Gabby becomes manic depressive. After the local mean girl gets murdered, Emma starts to realize what's happening. It's not very scary; in fact, the plot does get tedious and drags in places, but it is atmospheric and the acting is pretty good. However, it kind of ends on an incomplete note with no police involvement or resolutions. The other big problem I have is that the movie is based loosely on the discovery of actual abandoned human ashes found abandoned at Oregon State Hospital in 2015. Making a horror movie instead of a documentary on this discovery seems quite in bad taste to me. "House of Dust" is a fair horror movie that isn't really that memorable except for this fact. It's worth a look for its creepy moments, but it's not as intense as one would expect a horror movie should be.
Review of House of Dust
