House Red

A couple (Clara Paget, Sam Wilkinson) travel to Tuscany to pick grapes for a vineyard that makes the best wine they have ever tasted. When they arrive, they aren’t sure what to make of the place and its strange owners (Natasha Henstridge, Gary Mavers).

A haphazard and poorly executed story full of incredibly low-impact twists and turns. There’s something drastically wrong with the pacing, it’s a film that somehow runs out of steam before it truly gets going.

Something may have gone wrong in production here. The run-time is a mere 1h17m, with more than ten minutes of that going to its title sequence and end credits. Most of the scenes are build-up to a final third that barely exists. From what I can tell, House Red wrapped over five years ago but only got a release in November this year—always a bad sign.

It’s rescued by good performances from Paget and Henstridge and excellent photography in the Tuscan countryside. What they did manage to make looks the part, but I’m not convinced that what we are seeing is what was planned.