The House of Flowers: The Movie

Movie review by Barbara Shulgasser-Parker, Common Sense Media
The House of Flowers: The Movie Poster Image

Common Sense says

age 15+

Mexican series-based comedy has sex, language, violence.

NR 2021 86 minutes
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  • The House of Flowers: The Movie Movie: Scene # 1
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A Lot or a Little?

The parents' guide to what's in this movie.

What Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that House of Flowers: The Movie derives from a popular 2018 Mexican TV series of the same name (La Casa de las Flores) created for Netflix. The highly-stylized approach is designed to send up the format of the popular Spanish-language telenovela soap operas, but is steeped in that genre's conventions, making it at times indistinguishable from what it's parodying. Class, wealth, race, sex, drugs, violence, infidelity, and LGBTQ+ issues are fodder for jokes and comic plot points. Language includes "f--k," "s--t," "d--k," 'damn," "bitch," "popping my cherry," "glory hole," and "slut." Characters drink alcohol. A youth has been in and out of rehab and is said to have a soft-core porn addiction. A groom has sex with another woman during his wedding reception and is seen naked from behind. Avenging an old unsolved murder triggers a plot. Someone is beaten and killed. Someone falls through a skylight.

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What's the Story?

In HOUSE OF FLOWERS: THE MOVIE, Delia (Norma Angelica) is the beloved former nanny of the wealthy de la Moras, a family that made its fortune in the flower business. The parents are gone but they left the wealth and memories to the children, now grown with kids of their own. They remain devoted to Delia and when she disappears for a few days, they worry. Only Paulina (Cecilia Suarez) knows that Delia is secretly in the hospital dying of a terminal illness. Her dying wish is for the children to recover a "treasure" they hid in the wall of their recently-sold mansion. The kids also want to expose the killer of another loved one, Pato, murdered, they are sure, by Agustin (Emilio Cuaik), now dead himself. The siblings crash a party thrown at their old mansion, hoping to recover the treasure. Simultaneous with this plot is a flashback in faded color to another party at the mansion in the 1980s, complete with that era's big hair and big shoulders, depicting a plot carried out by their mother, Virginia (Isabel Burr). In the end, family members declare continuing loyalty to each other and continue to enjoy their privileges.

Is It Any Good?

It seems a good bet that unless you've seen and enjoyed the Mexican Netflix television series on which this is based, House of Flowers: The Movie will be nearly unwatchable. Written accounts tag this as a gift from the director and cast to the defunct TV shows' adoring worldwide fans. Anyone not steeped in the minutiae of the phenomenon will be overwhelmed by a flood of characters, and to comprehend the action their names and relationships to each other must be identified, understood, and remembered. The cast strains to achieve over-the-top performances in this farcical, painfully-inept plot, a plot so self mocking that the ineptitude could only be deliberate. But deliberate is not the same as good. Drug problems are a joke, murder is a joke, adultery is a joke. All are subjects that make this fare most suitable for teens, but only teens with a lot of patience.

Allegedly designed in its first seasons to satirize the telenovela style of overwrought soap opera, it's now a parody itself, a time-release capsule of overused ideas, doled out indecipherably. Someone asks, "Why do rich people in Mexico have the worst taste?" a question that, even if true, hardly represents groundbreaking social thought. SNL did genre parodies 40 years ago, and movies, including Airplane!, Young Frankenstein, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad, and This is Spinal Tap. Those and others made genre-mocking a mainstream guilty pleasure. With nothing new to offer, there's no pleasure, guilty or otherwise, here.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about over-the-top-comedy. Characters respond strangely to obstacles. Would you break into your old house to retrieve a "treasure"? Is this funny?

  • The current plot is intercut with the flashback to a similar plot line. Do you think that approach adds to our understanding of the action? Why or why not?

  • A character's drug problems and repeated rehab stints are treated as material for jokes, as are many issues that in real life would be serious and no cause for joking. How does this affect the viewer's enjoyment of the movie?

Movie Details

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