Geoffrey Scott

Safe as Houses

Hybrid live-action / animation film about a security guard.

“Safe as Houses is a film, following a night-shift security guard’s spiral into paranoia. Employing a combination of live-footage and hand-drawn animation, the film is a dreamlike exploration of masculinity and isolation. During several nighttime bike rides through some wealthy mid-town Toronto neighbourhoods, I noticed the vigilant presence of private security guards. Men in polo shirts and windbreakers, roaming the gardens and driveways of mansions lit by pot lights, or alternatively sitting in decal laden Honda accords. My interest was piqued. What service are they providing their well-moneyed clients? Protection? Deterrence? Or peace of mind? This question is integral to the story of Safe as Houses. The easily smudged line between rational and irrational fear, and the convincing voice of anxious paranoia, are at the core of Jesse’s (a security guard) experience.This film is most easily described as a hybrid of live footage and animation, though this is not a perfect description. The filmmaking approach of situating actors into artificial scenery is both historically well-precedented, and increasingly ubiquitous. Many of the biggest selling films currently, are entirely shot in front of green screen, with expensive photo-realistic CGI realms added in later. In this modern world of photo-realism, Safe as Houses has more in common with early 20th century efforts in matte painting. Ever since Georges Méliès took the world on A Trip to the Moon in 1902, filmmakers have reached for the paintbrushes whenever a scene is too otherworldly, expensive, or otherwise impractical to achieve photographically. Some examples of matte painting include the establishing shot of Xanadu, the fictional estate in Citizen Kane (1941) or the luscious pastoral landscapes painted by Russell Lawson for Douglas Sirk’s 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows. The whimsical artifice of these scenes, evokes a feeling of mystery.The distinction between real and artificial imagery is inherent to the form of composited video. This distinction is particularly obvious in Safe as Houses as the drawn component is considerably cartoonish, when compared to the realist paintings of 20th century Hollywood mattes. The contrast between the photographic and drawn / painted elements, increases as the drawn / painted elements become less realistic. In Safe as Houses the people are photographic, and the setting is drawn / painted. This division of elements places the contrast between the person and the place, creating tension, and a mistrust of the environment. Jesse’s paranoia is tied to the estate where he works, and the formal separation between him and this setting heightens his discordance.Isolation is the source of uneasiness throughout the film. Jesse is a loner, as is his new employer, the mysterious resident of the house he is defending. Working night shifts, and with his mother June out of town for a month-long road trip, Jesse’s world is a lonely oscillation between tense anticipation at work, and aimless fatigue at home. These conditions foster a sense of unspecific paranoid expectancy. Everything becomes a potential threat, whether it’s a car parked across the street, or the wind rustling a bush, or the shadows cast by the tall trees on the gated property. Shouldering this paranoia is what Jesse is being payed to do. The man whose home he patrols each night, is himself deeply fearful of these ambiguous threats looming at the fringes of the imagination. This man, initially shrouded in mystery, is revealed to be a famously anonymous contemporary artist. It’s exceedingly unlikely that anyone is coming to find him, and the house itself, while grand, seems too dusty to contain anything of exceptional value, and simultaneously not quite abandoned enough to attract marauders. Nonetheless, his agoraphobic isolation is handed to Jesse, who must bear it.”