FF Review: The Hamster Cage

I'm very fond of dysfunctional family comedies -- Home for the Holidays, Slums of Beverly Hills, and even the ultra-dark Where's Poppa? are all films I've enjoyed. So it was disappointing to discover that the Canadian dysfunctional family film The Hamster Cage, which played at Fantastic Fest this week, was only sporadically funny or entertaining.

The Hamster Cage is an over-the-top attempt at dark comedy: a family reunites for a special dinner to celebrate the father winning the Nobel Prize. As daughter Lucy (Jillian Fargey) and son Paul (Tom Scholte) enter their parents' home, we notice that Mom (Patricia Dahlquist) doesn't talk to Lucy, and Paul avoids Dad (Alan Scarfe) but engages in overly long embraces with his Mom. When Lucy learns that Uncle Stan (Scott Hylands) is expected, she flies into a rage. Uncle Stan shows up with Candy (Carly Pope), a 22-year-old writer dressed like a 12-year-old, and a stack of presents. You know how relatives sometimes use gifts as sly weapons to hurt or embarrass family members? Uncle Stan's gifts take that to extremes.

The storyline throws in every type of horrible family secret possible: jealous spouses, cheating husbands, wives stripped of their careers, ungrateful children ... and also child abuse, sexual abuse, incest, attempted murder, more attempted murder, and more incest. All kinds of nasty secrets are revealed and sparks fly ... as well as some lethal weapons.

Like several other films I've seen at Fantastic Fest, The Hamster Cage would have worked better as a short film, compressing all the crazy events into maybe 20 minutes. Instead, every outrageous family revelation is surrounded by long passages of conversation, or scenes where the family members all glower with hate for one another, or inane commentary by Candy, the outsider, as she attempts to record the evening's events. The pacing is too slow for a comedy, with very little suspense, and the last 20 minutes in particular tend to crawl. The acting is all slightly overstyled in the way that some filmmakers deem necessary for dark comedies, like Bob Balaban's film Parents.

The Hamster Cage does have its funny moments: Uncle Stan's continual resurfacing at odd moments, Candy's arousal from intellectual conversation and the scenes in the pet cemetery. Candy is, in fact, the most overtly comic element of the film, from her schoolgirl outfit (complete with pink backpack) to her ditzy lines, my favorite being, "I blew a Nobel Prize winner! Freaky!" The film's music often provides subtle humor, as when Mom bustles around the kitchen humming "Bird in a Gilded Cage."

Certain plot elements of The Hamster Cage reminded me of another dysfunctional family film that I didn't enjoy, The House of Yes, which I found too stagy and irritating. If you parodied The House of Yes to extremes, making every situation in the film even more outrageous but retaining the drama of the ending, you might end up with a movie like The Hamster Cage.