‘The Good House’ Review: Sigourney Weaver Plays a Woman With a Secret Everyone Else Can See
Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic A middling movie with a must-see performance at its core, “The Good House” does something interesting with the notion of the unreliable narrator. As the unfortunately named Hildy Good (blame novelist Ann Leary, not married filmmakers Maya Forbes and Wallace Wolodarsky for that decision), Sigourney Weaver brings deceptive self-confidence to the role of a small-town Realtor. We meet Hildy introducing a couple to the fictional New England fishing village of where the Good family has lived for so long, there’s talk of witches in their past. But Hildy can’t be trusted — not because her character is bad (she’s Good, get it?), but because she’s in denial. “I can walk through a house once and know more about its occupants than a psychiatrist … could in a year of sessions,” Hildy boasts, addressing the audience directly. In truth, she’s not talking to us so much as she is rationalizing things to herself. The slyly insightful way Forbes (“Infinitely Polar Bear”) and Wolodarsky (who spent years writing for animation) have constructed “The Good House,” watching Hildy throw down boss energy to clients and the camera is like being inside her head, where the first person she has to convince that she’s in control is herself. We buy it — for a time — but the characters don’t, and that mismatch is the crux of all that follows.