From its clinical opening moments—a series of wide, indoor, static shots of a somewhat abandoned house in need of renovation—Harry Aspinwall’s feature film directorial debut, the coldly sparse chamber piece “The House Was Not Hungry Then” (2025), establishes the purely observational approach applied to its poltergeist horror story; an ominous sequence that not only displays the limited geography of the film’s single location, a coverage consisting of six different vistas but also lulls the audience into a sedated state of passive witnessing, assuming the role of onlookers.

The timing of this film is rather incidental, to say the least, for the minimal restraint and unobtrusive detachment in terms of presentation feel like an economic cross-breed between the visual gimmicks of two very recent movies by high-profile filmmakers: Robert Zemeckis’ deeply flawed and tedious technical exercise “Here” (2024), a centuries-spanning film shot entirely from a single angle, and Steven Soderbergh...