In the Flesh: Sex House

If you want a picture of the future, imagine being forced to deepthroat a dildo somehow synthesized from the physical manifestations of the worst experiences of your life — forever. Written by Sam West, Sam Kemmis, Geoff Haggerty (who also directs), Matt Klinman, Chris Sartinsky, and Michael Pielocik, Sex House is that dildo. It is a tour de force, hilarious both in a skin-crawling, pitch-black satirical sense and on the level of great mimicry. Its peerless comedic timing becomes a weapon its uses against its viewers, just as its expert emulation of reality TV’s moronic rhythms and reliance on contrivances subconsciously primes us for the absurd horrors to come. If someone’s going to go to all the trouble of engineering drama and pushing people into sexually charged scenarios, why shouldn’t the squalid strangeness of their ambitions spill onto the screen? Why shouldn’t we find ourselves lost in a filthy facsimile of a house drowning in hairy sheets of mold and full of various kinds of initially repulsive idiot we come to understand as fully human before the show, having gotten its knife past our ribs, gives it one last magnificent twist?

The mock-reality TV format with which the show’s creators approach their subject matter is eerily precise, edited with a kind of sly dishonesty that turns human degradation and suffering into cheap laughs. The show depicts married accountant Frank (Jesse Dabson) taking advantage of drunk and disoriented 18-year-old virgin Erin (Fiona Robert) with the same leering, sleazy framing it gives a game of oiled-up Twister. The camera crew are wisely kept as unknowns, even when they’re sealed up in the titular “house” along with the contestants in the wake of the show’s temporary cancellation. “We do not speak to them,” Frank says gravely, “and they do not speak to us. It is a tenuous peace.” They are the apparatus by which the cast is dehumanized, and so must remain dehumanized themselves. When this barrier is broken, as when Alex’s (Lea Pascal) partner Paul Hamlin (Patrick Zielinski) reveals himself to be both a stalker and the voice used to announce changes and new events in the Sex House, the effect is grotesque. Alex’s discomfort and terror war on her expressive features with the knowledge that to reject him is to endanger the tenuous and marginal success her misery has granted her.

This is perhaps the show’s most brutal stroke of genius, that its characters cling so desperately to the spectacle of their own torture and humiliation, compelled by the same anglerfish lure which first tempted them into the House. As when a wall panel collapses to reveal a window and the outside world beyond it only for the starved and delirious cast to board it back up and declare “the mold will seal it over”, the contestants choose imprisonment again and again. Their suffering only serves to bind them to the House and the show, and in the ghoulish final episode as we zip forward in time from complete apocalyptic breakdown to a disturbing reunion episode, the amalgamation of human life and televised spectacle is complete. If something human still writhes behind the once cringe-inducingly forward and outspoken Alex’s fixed grin and glassy stare, she is actively engaged in killing it. This is the human soul as product, crushed and deformed to fit the viewing public’s hateful appetites, and if that isn’t enough, you’re still going to have to run a blog.