Fantastic Fest Review: Play House

Everyone has that kids’ TV show that, in hindsight, can only be described as “nightmare fuel.” Growing up in the 1970s in Britain, we had Pipkins, a series about a curiosity shop tended to by a series of puppets including Hartley Hare, a mangy mass of fur with a snide tone who even the puppeteers seemed to loathe.

Of course, we all loved those shows as children, but with adults’ eyes we now see them for being deeply disturbing. The central conceit of Play House is about having that realization without the cushioning childhood memories of a beloved institution. To be exposed to something that is bloodcurdlingly wrong.

The winner of the inaugural Fantastic Fest pitch competition in 2025, Play House made it back to the Alamo Drafthouse for its world premiere almost exactly a year after the creators walked away with a $100,000 check from producers Chroma. However, director Nicolas Curcio (who cowrote the script with Kirby Gladstein), isn’t exactly treading completely new ground here. Play House owes a deep debt to Sinister in its setup, and also to the Candle Cove season of Channel Zero, with its depiction of a children’s TV show at the edge of memory.

What Curcio does have is a perfectly depicted story of twentysomethings in the post-financial security era, each navigating the complexities of their little interwoven relationship. Elliot (Will Harrison), Cath (Jessica Sulla), and Alden (Jordan Gonzalez) have been friends forever, and then sex got in the way when Elliot and Cath started dating, and that didn’t work out, so now Alden is caught in the middle, and Elliot’s not really over it, and Cath keeps sending extremely mixed signals.

Seemingly to upend this stagnation, Elliot becomes a homeowner. True, the property has been abandoned for years due to eminent domain and a planning snafu, and every surface is rotten or covered in mold, but at least it’s a house, and maybe it will make Cath reconsider things.

Curcio honestly could have left things there, as a poignant indie drama about contemporary relationships and how multilayered personal histories make clean separations impossible. Instead, Curcio leaves Elliot a housewarming gift: a plastic bag filled with old VHS tapes of a kids’ show called Monster Alley presented by a host called Mr. Morton (James Urbaniak). But there’s something off about it. It looks homemade, but the puppets are a little too professional. There’s only one camera and seemingly no crew, so who are the children voicing the puppets? And why is there no trace of this show anywhere online?

Much like Damian McCarthy (Hokum, Oddity), Curcio overlaps his sources of horror. Mixed in with the suggestions of Mr. Morton’s sins and his psychological breakdown is the hint of something supernatural transpiring down in the basement. Much of this is carried by Nina Millin in a perfectly over-the-top performance as Elliot’s realtor and part-time medium. There’s also some real home renovation trauma happening here, and every time Elliot paints over some mildew without at least putting some primer down homeowners and DIYers everywhere will groan in misery.

Yet moments like that work towards the idea of the giddy optimism of youth. Alden, Cath, and Elliot haven’t had that enthusiasm completely knocked out of them yet, even as Mr. Morton’s tapes become increasingly tragic and terrifying in equal measures. It’s in Urbaniak’s understated performance, a mix of groundless optimism and growing despair, that Play House finds its drama, as Elliot watches a man in decline. The mundanity of his evil, if one can even call him that, is what makes Urbaniak so memorable, and helps Play House become more than the recycled bricks of other such stories from which it is built.

Fantastic Fest runs Sept. 17-24 at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. Badges and info at fantasticfest.com. Follow our coverage at austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.

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