A bored teenager's homework assignment turns into an obsession that pulls his teacher into someone else's living room, and neither man can look away.
What is In the House about?
Germain, a French literature teacher weary of his students' flat, uninspired essays, finds something different in a paper from sixteen-year-old Claude: a sharp, unsettling account of the boy inserting himself into the home of a classmate's ordinary middle-class family. Germain, half against his own judgment, encourages Claude to keep writing installment after installment, coaching him on pacing and cliffhangers the way an editor would a novelist. What starts as literary mentorship curdles into something closer to complicity, as the line between observing a family and manipulating it blurs, and Germain's own marriage and career start absorbing the fallout of a story he can no longer stop reading.
About the cast
Fabrice Luchini plays the teacher with a mix of vanity and genuine hunger for good writing, while Ernst Umhauer, in his feature debut, gives the student an unreadable calm that keeps the audience guessing about his motives. Kristin Scott Thomas appears as Germain's wife, a gallery director whose own frustrations run parallel to his, and Emmanuelle Seigner plays the mother whose household becomes the subject of Claude's essays.
Context & significance
Directed by François Ozon and adapted from Juan Mayorga's stage play The Boy in the Last Row, the film won the Louis Delluc Prize and was recognized at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. Ozon builds the story as a nested narrative, staging scenes from Claude's essays as if they were really happening, which lets the film play with how much of what viewers see is invention and how much is fact.
Watching In the House on Ktime
In the House streams on K-Time with a Persian dub, so Farsi-speaking viewers can follow every twist of Germain and Claude's escalating game without subtitles. Watching requires only a free K-Time account login, and the full Farsi interface makes browsing and picking up where you left off simple for audiences across the diaspora.