Last night, I uncharacteristically left my house near sunset and traveled to the Charles Theatre for a screening at the New/Next Film Festival. The film was Room Temperature—the latest collaboration between writer Dennis Cooper and visual artist Zac Farley, both of whom were present for a Q&A after the showing. Briefly, the film follows the preparation and staging of a family’s annual ‘home haunt’ in the blasted-out landscape of the California desert. As Cooper was later careful to point out during the Q&A, home haunts are not the same as haunted houses, the latter which are professional operations held in spaces suitable for an elaborate production. In contrast, a home haunt is a labor of love—an amateur affair cobbled together and usually acted out by enthusiastic family and friends. Farley confessed that he and Cooper were obsessed with these seasonal artistic events, which clearly served the film well.

When I first moved to Baltimore, some friends took me to a home haunt set up in a rowhouse, which if you’ve ever been in one, obviously presents certain spatial challenges to such an endeavor. There are only so many rowhouse layouts, and none of them are ideal for staging a home haunt. But these people must have been involved in theater, because the experience was fantastic (and even scary at times). While there was no unified narrative to the haunt, the creators had scripted individual scenes that were cordoned off from the main route through the house. They had also somehow rigged the basement stairs so that you had to descend backwards into what looked like the bowels of hell. Once your feet found the floor again, the artistically enhanced dungeon-like atmosphere, low ceiling, and general creepy vibe characteristic of all unfinished rowhouse basements hit you full-on. Before long, you were face-to-face with an evil doctor conducting unspeakable experiments on a patient sprawled across a bloody hospital bed.

Now, that experience occurred about 20 years ago, so my memory of it has likely undergone its own diabolical modifications, but what I recall most strongly is a sense of disorientation. I’d been in enough rowhouses by that point to know what to expect in terms of general layout. However, those expectations evaporated once I began walking through this house, which had been expertly partitioned into a maze. Fear comes from, among other sources, uncertainty and sensory deprivation, which are key elements exploited by a successful home haunt. While the haunt in this film cannot be deemed a success in terms of scares—a fact key to the narrative—the film itself more than surpasses its goal to disorient the viewer.

Although the haunt preparations—ridiculous as they may look—dominate the action in the film, what occurs underneath and around those preparations is where the heart of the film thrums. Certainly, no family is ‘normal’ despite how they may appear from the outside, but the family in this film is clearly in deep trouble. At this point in the history of their haunt (it’s been held for years), enthusiasm over it has waned significantly amongst all family members but the father, and perhaps the daughter, Marguerite. The latter, however, seems to live on her own planet (her mother Beatrice refers to her as ‘crazy’), so it’s hard to say for sure with her. Beatrice bemoans the erosion of narrative in the haunt, opining that her husband has lost his way. The two other family members—teenage boy Andre and ‘adopted’ older teen boy Extra—have mixed feelings about their participation. To clarify, Extra is French and has lived with the family since he was 8; he and Andre have a ‘special’ friendship, which the father clearly disapproves of. All kinds of hilarity can be had over Extra’s name, but I’m trying to stay relatively on point here.

Within the film, the only character with significant time to observe the family as an outsider is the janitor Paul from the older kids’ school, who is ‘hired’ part-time to help prepare and run the haunt. Comically, Paul seems not much older, if at all, than the teens themselves, and everyone from school is mildly surprised to find him on site at the haunt, though he himself finds nothing unusual about it. If I had to describe Paul’s demeanor throughout the film in one word, I’d call him nonplussed. Nothing shocks or disturbs him, and he sees and hears a lot. He also doles out his fair share of caustic retorts and one-liners with an admirable deadpan delivery. As the sole external observer-participant in this absurd and weirdly heartbreaking carnival of family drama, his role is crucial in showing just how insular and out of touch with reality the family is.

The relationship between Andre and Extra is central to the film, though it is obliquely portrayed, in part due to being dwarfed by the haunt itself and also by reason of what happens to Extra. There is a tenderness between these two that is so touching, and yet Extra is a character whose sincerity can come off as laughable at times. This is indicative of a greater tension within the film, that of a constant seesaw between expressions of mordant humor and portrayals of emotional vulnerability. Another example comes at the end, when Andre is standing in the backyard. As happens often throughout the film, we see a close-up of his face as he delivers a line, followed by a long moment where it appears he’s about to say something else, as if he’s thinking carefully of what he wants to say—his expression is riveting to watch—and finally, what does eventually come out is unexpectedly tinged with flippancy.

I would be remiss in not also mentioning the film’s score by Frederikke Hoffmeier (aka Puce Mary). As Cooper noted during the Q&A, music in mainstream film is frequently used in an emotionally manipulative way. Much like how fiction that tells instead of shows insults a reader’s intelligence, the abuse of music in film discounts both the audience and the actors, by not allowing the entire range of human expression to fulfill its role. So, in this film there is no music playing during dialogue, and the only actual ‘song’ is one sung by Andre (and written by Chris Olsen, the actor playing Paul) in a particularly moving scene. That being said, the score is exceptional and fit the film like a latex glove.

Room Temperature is the kind of film that delivers a slow-release effect. It wasn’t until a few hours after watching it—inconveniently, in the middle of the night—that its full brilliance began to bloom in my mind (as did a craving to rewatch it). Of course, I then had to turn on a lamp and scribble a few notes, so I’d have something to work with when I sat down to write this. I started thinking about the film’s title, any potential significance of which hadn’t initially occurred to me. But it being the middle of the night, my mind was more amenable to free associations. I suddenly thought about Goldilocks and finding what was ‘just right’. Often, ‘room temperature’ is considered an ideal state to be reached, like when making bread. But room temperature can also be in flux; sometimes it is too cold or too hot. Yet, these extremes also depend on context: too cold or hot for what? Maybe you want it one way or the other, depending on your activity (or your state of mind). Goldilocks tried three bowls of porridge at varying temperatures, and this film flirts with three genres, none of which it fully commits to. It’s not horror, drama, or comedy. But it does resemble a fusion of elements from these genres. As such, it avoids the tropes and missteps common to genre loyalty. During the Q&A, Cooper and Farley were subjected to the usual questions about whether they were trying to emulate this or that, all of which they elegantly deflected, with Cooper finally stating they weren’t trying to do anything that had been done before, not working with any other films, directors, or styles in mind. In short, they wanted to do something unique. And so—at the risk of ending on a glib note—if I am Goldilocks in my inane middle-of-the-night metaphor, then I say what they served up is ‘just right’.