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The House of Yes
Metascore
54 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 15 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 6 out of 15
  2. Mixed: 8 out of 15
  3. Negative: 1 out of 15
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  1. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    75
    The House of Yes is what happens when a film takes the dysfunctional family melodrama to its farthest reaches. It's a bold, gutsy movie that's definitely not for everyone.
  2. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Liam Lacey
    75
    But it is bright, smart, sometimes wickedly funny, and crisply performed to the point where the acting seems richer than the script.
  3. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
    75
    The House of Yes is knowingly overripe, a kitsch melodrama that dares to make incest sexy.
  4. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: John Anderson
    70
    In addition to its terrifically bratty performance by the epically bratty Posey, House of Yes contains some of the smarter (and smarter-assed) writing of the year.
  5. Time
    Reviewed by: Richard Corliss
    70
    But the film is keyed to Posey's performance: perfectly brittle, faultlessly false. As the most toxic of this family of vipers, she creeps and stings, and no one dares look away.
  6. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    63
    When the film was over I was not particularly pleased that I had seen it; it was mostly behavior and contrivance. While it was running, I was not bored.
  7. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Ken Fox
    60
    For all its talk about sex, incest, insanity and the gory details of the Kennedy assassination, Mark Waters' adaptation of Wendy MacLeod's play doesn't really amount to much more than a lurid, thoroughly enjoyable little pot-boiler.
  8. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Lisa Alspector
    60
    Sex and JFK's assassination are intertwined in this puerile, pseudodark story about a wacky family--an adaptation of Wendy MacLeod's play that uses the medium of cinema mainly to exploit archival footage.
  9. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: David Sterritt
    50
    Written and directed by Mark Waters, who strives for David Mamet-style punchiness but doesn't develop the quirky momentum that would carry the deliberately out-of-kilter story past its implausibilities.
  10. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Edward Guthmann
    50
    Stylized dialogue tends to play awkwardly onscreen -- we're conditioned to naturalistic conversation in films -- and Waters, who makes his feature directing debut with The House of Yes, fails to create an emotional tone or attitude to match the characters' goofy repartee.
  11. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Manohla Dargis
    50
    What follows doesn't much surprise, since every emotional detail, accompanied by a noisy storm and then a black-out, arrives well in advance of its execution.
  12. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Keith Phipps
    50
    Director Mark Waters has done probably the best possible job translating the material to film, and the truly filmic moments work well, but with this dialogue-heavy material, it's like trying to translate Run-DMC lyrics into Old French.
  13. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Stephen Holden
    50
    The House of Yes was adapted from a play by Wendy MacLeod. And the movie, with its brittle, outrageous dialogue has a shrill stagy feel. That would be fine, if the dialogue sustained the stylish crackle of a drawing-room comedy gone berserk, but there are many gaping holes between the funny moments.
  14. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marc Savlov
    40
    Staged and stagy, this adaptation of Wendy MacLeod's play about family dysfunction and the "anti-Camelot" is a muddled, middling mess, despite a witty, top-drawer performance from Posey and a surprisingly comic turn from Spelling.
  15. USA Today
    Reviewed by: Susan Wloszczyna
    38
    With its Rocky Horror meets Camelot aura, this little black movie reeks of self-satisfied smugness and pretentious perversity as only a Sundance Festival favorite can -- especially one that squanders the considerable quirky charms of indie-film darling Parker Posey. [10Oct1997 pg 04.D]
    All this critic's reviews
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