The House of Tomorrow is a reliable, familiar type of film. It is a teenage coming of age story, with all the necessary plot twists, genre tropes and quirky you’ve-not-seen-this-character-before sort of characters viewers should expect from such a tale in 2018. Mix in dependable actors, competent directing and good attention to the set design and cinematographic details—lots of triangles everywhere—and the result is an entertaining, if not particularly novel, movie-watching experience. Bonus points to The House of Tomorrow for staying under 100 minutes.
Sebastian Prendergast (Asa Butterfield), a teenage boy of unspecified age, has spent his life almost entirely within sight of his home, “The House of Tomorrow,” a geodesic dome-cum-tourist destination in a sleepy town near the Twin Cities in Minnesota. He lives with his grandmother (Ellen Burstyn), an acolyte of famed ‘60s-era futurist thinker R. Buckminster Fuller, and together they give tours of the premises of their house to curious (though not very numerous) visitors. The extent of Sebastian’s exposure to the outside world is never clarified and the film offers contradictory clues about the matter, but The House of Tomorrow is not about details.
Sebastian’s world gets rocked, literally, by a visit from a local church youth group led by Alan Whitcomb (Nick Offerman, who wears a fanny pack in every scene in which he appears). Alan brings along his two unwilling teenage children, the sickly Jared (Alex Wolff) and the saucy Meredith (Maude Apatow). Both Whitcomb progeny make their mark on Sebastian after his grandmother suffers a medical emergency during their tour, Meredith through her sex appeal and Jared via his affinity for punk rock. Sebastian’s ears hear a few bars of Jared’s music and jolt him into a rebellious spirit quest to expand his horizons beyond his isolated dome.
From here, the plot proceeds fairly standardly. Sebastian hesitates to commit fully to Jared’s scheme to form a punk band and his hemming and hawing alienates both his new friend and his grandmother, who feels Sebastian is abandoning her ideals. Meanwhile, Meredith slowly reveals her gentle interior she publically keeps hidden behind her ferocious external demeanor. When Jared—a heart transplant recipient—suffers a health scare, Sebastian is forced to choose between the life he has always known with his grandmother or the future he could have by devoting himself to punk rock and the Whitcombs.
While the narrative of The House of Tomorrow is trope-laden (which is not a knock, by the way), the film gets its energy from the unique characters assembled here. Sebastian, with his Vault-Boy cluelessness, gets some laughs. Offerman wearing a fanny pack and awful pale khaki cargo shorts is also evergreen for comedic impact. Burstyn plays the grandmother as a devout Fuller disciple and combines well with the House of Tomorrow setting to make sure Fuller and his ideas serve as a framing device for much of the film’s discussion of values. The Whitcomb children are more stock, with Jared and his devotion to his art giving the film more than a little of the feel of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (a comparison further aided by Offerman playing a dad in each film). Apatow’s Meredith is not given enough screen time to be more than a standard protective big sister/teenage love interest combination.
A hackneyed plot, even one already done better by none less than Richard Linklater—School of Rock has children jamming to Zeppelin in a van while The House of Tomorrow has a few teenagers driving a stolen church van to their punk gig—can still be enjoyable. For fans of the genre, The House of Tomorrow faithfully offers up what is expected; for everyone else, it has punk, Fuller and some deep-dive geometry references.
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