# In the House (2012 film)
**In the House** (French: *Dans la maison*) is a 2012 French psychological comedy-drama directed by [François Ozon](https://www.edgepedia.org/francois-ozon), in which a sixteen-year-old student infiltrates a classmate's family and writes about them in essays that blur the line between reality and fiction for his jaded literature teacher. It is freely adapted from the Spanish play *The Boy in the Last Row* (*Le garçon du dernier rang*) by Juan Mayorga, and it won the Golden Shell for Best Film and the Best Screenplay prize at the 2012 San Sebastián International Film Festival.[1](https://kinolorber.com/film/in-the-house) • [2](https://repertoire.cinema.mcc.gouv.qc.ca/film/dans-la-maison-372029/) • [3](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1964624/awards/)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Original title | *Dans la maison*; English release title *In the House*[2](https://repertoire.cinema.mcc.gouv.qc.ca/film/dans-la-maison-372029/) |
| Director and source | François Ozon; freely adapted from Juan Mayorga's play *The Boy in the Last Row*[1](https://kinolorber.com/film/in-the-house) • [4](https://www.nziff.co.nz/2013/archive/in-the-house/) |
| Principal cast | Fabrice Luchini (Germain), Ernst Umhauer (Claude), Kristin Scott Thomas (Jeanne), Emmanuelle Seigner (Esther), Denis Ménochet, Bastien Ughetto[1](https://kinolorber.com/film/in-the-house) • [4](https://www.nziff.co.nz/2013/archive/in-the-house/) |
| Format | France, 2012, 105 minutes, French language, color[1](https://kinolorber.com/film/in-the-house) |
| French release | 10 October 2012; 1,195,518 admissions in France and $13,364,713 worldwide[5](https://www.francois-ozon.fr/filmographie/dans-la-maison/) • [6](https://www.cnc.fr/professionnels/visas-et-classification?visa=130567) |
| Major awards | Golden Shell and Best Screenplay, San Sebastián 2012; International Critics' Award (FIPRESCI), Toronto 2012; European Screenwriter, European Film Awards 2013[3](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1964624/awards/) |
| Critical scores | Metascore 72 from 25 reviews; Rotten Tomatoes 88%; IMDb 7.3/10[7](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/in-the-house/) • [8](https://sinekatalog.com/en/films/in-the-house.html) |
## Spoilers
### Premise and plot
Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer), a sixteen-year-old student at the Lycée Gustave Flaubert, turns in a homework essay describing how he has insinuated himself into the household of a more affluent classmate, Rapha Artole Jr (Bastien Ughetto), ostensibly to help him with trigonometry. There he observes the family: Rapha's father (Denis Ménochet), preoccupied with his work and with China, and his mother Esther ([Emmanuelle Seigner](https://www.edgepedia.org/emmanuelle-seigner)), bored and dreaming of interior decoration, whom Claude describes as carrying "the singular scent of a middle-class woman".[9](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/mar/22/in-the-house-francois-ozon) • [2](https://repertoire.cinema.mcc.gouv.qc.ca/film/dans-la-maison-372029/)
The essays wake his literature teacher, Germain (Fabrice Luchini), out of a career-long slump. Germain encourages Claude to continue the serial, each installment ending "To be continued", and gives him technical advice on writing, steering him away from caricature and toward the plausible rather than the factual. As the story advances, Claude's writing and the events it describes become harder to separate, and Germain is drawn so far into the fiction that he imagines himself inside Claude's scenes. Germain's wife Jeanne ([Kristin Scott Thomas](https://www.edgepedia.org/kristin-scott-thomas)), who runs an avant-garde art gallery, follows the installments as a titillating serial, and the boy's intrusion eventually unleashes consequences that cost Germain his job and alter his marriage.[9](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/mar/22/in-the-house-francois-ozon) • [10](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/mar/31/in-the-house-review) • [4](https://www.nziff.co.nz/2013/archive/in-the-house/)
Ozon described the ending as deliberately ambiguous: when Claude asks Esther to run away with him, the next scene shows him waking up, and Esther says "What happened between us never existed". In his view, by the end reality and imagination blend into one, "because to me, at the end of the day, it's all real".[11](https://medias.unifrance.org/medias/121/73/84345/presse/dans-la-maison-dossier-de-presse-anglais.pdf)
## Adaptation from Mayorga's play
Ozon encountered the play by chance when an actress friend invited him to a performance, and he was struck by the two-way teacher-student relationship, in which "the learning goes both ways". He read the Germain-Claude pairing as the essential partnership of any creative endeavor: editor and writer, producer and director, reader and writer, audience and director.[11](https://medias.unifrance.org/medias/121/73/84345/presse/dans-la-maison-dossier-de-presse-anglais.pdf)
The adaptation required substantial restructuring. The play is a continuous stream of dialogue with no contained scenes and no specified locations, so Ozon's first task was to create a space-time structure across the classroom, the art gallery, the house, and the park. He simplified the young characters' dialogue, which he found too theatrical, and cut most of the play's theories about the act of creation. He also built a social context for Claude that the play had left undeveloped: a disadvantaged boy with a handicapped father and no mother, whose modest suburban home is revealed only late in the film. The play's ending, in which Germain slaps Claude and ends their relationship, was replaced; in the film, Germain's private life is irreversibly altered, and the two are reunited in the final scene on a bench at a rest home, which Ozon called "in a way, a happy ending".[11](https://medias.unifrance.org/medias/121/73/84345/presse/dans-la-maison-dossier-de-presse-anglais.pdf)
Ozon also changed how Claude's writing is represented on screen. The first installment is read aloud in full by Germain; the second is visualized with Claude's voiceover; as the film progresses the voiceover recedes and dialogue and images take over. He considered setting the story in England to use school uniforms, then settled on a pilot school experimenting with bringing back the uniform, a recurring debate in France.[11](https://medias.unifrance.org/medias/121/73/84345/presse/dans-la-maison-dossier-de-presse-anglais.pdf)
## Production
*Dans la maison* was Ozon's thirteenth feature film and his fourth theatrical adaptation, after *Water Drops on Burning Rocks*, *8 Women*, and *[Potiche](https://www.edgepedia.org/potiche)*. It was shot in eight weeks in August and September 2011, produced by Eric and Nicolas Altmayer for Mandarin Cinéma with co-production from France 2 Cinéma and Mars Films, on a budget of about €9.2 million, with international sales by Wild Bunch.[12](https://cineuropa.org/fr/newsdetail/210511/) Ozon cast Fabrice Luchini, with whom he had just worked on *Potiche*, as Germain; the director said the role let the actor express his love of literature and his vocation as a transmitter of great works. Ernst Umhauer was twenty-one at the time of the shoot but looked like a teenager, which Ozon considered perfect for the sixteen-year-old Claude, whose voice is omnipresent in the film.[11](https://medias.unifrance.org/medias/121/73/84345/presse/dans-la-maison-dossier-de-presse-anglais.pdf) Philippe Rombi composed the score, receiving the script before the shoot so that his music could shape the directing choices.[4](https://www.nziff.co.nz/2013/archive/in-the-house/) • [11](https://medias.unifrance.org/medias/121/73/84345/presse/dans-la-maison-dossier-de-presse-anglais.pdf)
The film received its French visa on 11 May 2012 and opened in French cinemas on 10 October 2012, distributed by Mars Films.[6](https://www.cnc.fr/professionnels/visas-et-classification?visa=130567) It screened at Toronto, San Sebastián, and London in 2012, and reached the United States in 2013 through Cohen Media Group.[4](https://www.nziff.co.nz/2013/archive/in-the-house/) • [7](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/in-the-house/)
## Reception and awards
At [San Sebastián](https://www.edgepedia.org/san-sebastian) the film won the Golden Shell for Best Film and the Jury Prize for Best Screenplay; at Toronto it won the FIPRESCI International Critics' Award, cited "for achieving an exquisitely crafted entertainment that blurs the distinction between the storyteller and the story told". Ozon won the European Film Award for European Screenwriter in 2013, and the film received César nominations for Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (Luchini), Most Promising Actor (Umhauer), and Best Original Music (Rombi).[3](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1964624/awards/) • [5](https://www.francois-ozon.fr/filmographie/dans-la-maison/)
Critics responded strongly to the film's play with narrative. The *New York Times* called it "one of this year's outstanding films" and "sinfully delicious"; Empire gave it 100, writing that Ozon "mingles the real and imaginary with terrific effect"; the *Village Voice* praised its investigation of why voyeurism and mystery delight us. Philip French in *The Observer* called it Ozon's best work to date, reading the title as a reference to [Henry James](https://www.edgepedia.org/henry-james)'s "house of fiction" and noting a final image modeled on the set of Hitchcock's *Rear Window*. More reserved reviews, including Peter Bradshaw's three-star Guardian notice and a 40 from Time Out, found the ending less satisfying than the setup.[1](https://kinolorber.com/film/in-the-house) • [7](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/in-the-house/) • [10](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/mar/31/in-the-house-review) The film earned a Metascore of 72 from 25 reviews, with 84 percent positive, and holds 88 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.[7](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/in-the-house/) • [8](https://sinekatalog.com/en/films/in-the-house.html)
## Themes
The film's central subject is the boundary between fiction and reality, examined through voyeurism, manipulation, and the ethics of storytelling. The Quebec classification notes describe it as being about "the process of creation and the borders between reality and fiction", with darker themes of psychological manipulation, voyeurism, and humiliation beneath the comedy.[2](https://repertoire.cinema.mcc.gouv.qc.ca/film/dans-la-maison-372029/) Ozon framed the film as an indirect statement about his own work, cinema, and what it is to create and to be an audience, while denying that it is a self-portrait; he related instead to the Claude-Germain exchange, having been the son of two teachers and a poor student himself, "a bit the boy in the last row".[11](https://medias.unifrance.org/medias/121/73/84345/presse/dans-la-maison-dossier-de-presse-anglais.pdf) • [13](https://www.bfmtv.com/people/cinema/francois-ozon-j-etais-un-peu-le-garcon-du-dernier-rang_AN-201210090047.html)
The Guardian placed the film in a decade-long sequence with *Swimming Pool* (2002) as studies of the novelist as "cold-blooded parasite", and critics noted its Buñuelian comedy of manners and its puncturing of bourgeois pretensions, with the house functioning as a metaphor for the story itself, full of levels, mirrors, and partially open doors.[9](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/mar/22/in-the-house-francois-ozon) • [14](https://ifi.ie/film/in-the-house/) • [15](https://mubi.com/en/films/in-the-house/critics-reviews)
## References
1. [In the House, Kino Lorber Theatrical](https://kinolorber.com/film/in-the-house)
2. [Dans la maison, Répertoire des films classés, Québec](https://repertoire.cinema.mcc.gouv.qc.ca/film/dans-la-maison-372029/)
3. [In the House (2012) – Awards, IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1964624/awards/)
4. [In the House, New Zealand International Film Festival 2013](https://www.nziff.co.nz/2013/archive/in-the-house/)
5. [Dans la maison, François Ozon filmography](https://www.francois-ozon.fr/filmographie/dans-la-maison/)
6. [Visas et Classification, CNC, visa 130567](https://www.cnc.fr/professionnels/visas-et-classification?visa=130567)
7. [In the House Reviews, Metacritic](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/in-the-house/)
8. [In the House (Dans la maison) (2012), Sinekatalog](https://sinekatalog.com/en/films/in-the-house.html)
9. [François Ozon's In the House puts reality on trial, The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/mar/22/in-the-house-francois-ozon)
10. [In the House – review, The Guardian/Observer](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/mar/31/in-the-house-review)
11. [Interview with François Ozon, In the House press kit, UniFrance](https://medias.unifrance.org/medias/121/73/84345/presse/dans-la-maison-dossier-de-presse-anglais.pdf)
12. [Le voile se lève sur Dans la maison de François Ozon, Cineuropa](https://cineuropa.org/fr/newsdetail/210511/)
13. [François Ozon : "j'étais un peu le garçon du dernier rang", BFM TV](https://www.bfmtv.com/people/cinema/francois-ozon-j-etais-un-peu-le-garcon-du-dernier-rang_AN-201210090047.html)
14. [In the House, Irish Film Institute](https://ifi.ie/film/in-the-house/)
15. [In the House (2012) critic reviews, MUBI](https://mubi.com/en/films/in-the-house/critics-reviews)
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