The Seasoning House (2012) – Film Summary and Review

The Seasoning House is a British horror film set in Europe during the Yugoslav Wars. It was directed by Paul Hyett who is better known for his expertise in makeup and special effects (Eden Lake, The Descent).

The majority of the action takes place in an illegal brothel, where kidnapped girls are forced to live in squalor and cater to the various perverted desires of the brothel’s unwholesome clientele. Rosie Day (Family Affairs, Homefront) stars as Angel, a deaf-mute brought to the brothel by the soldiers who murdered her mother.

Kevin Howarth (The Last Horror Movie, Razor Blade Smile) plays the brothel’s head man, Viktor. He’s cold and cruel and altogether a nasty piece of work but he takes a shine to the young mute, saving her for his own bed, thereby sparing her many of the cruelties that the other girls have to endure until their abused bodies finally give up the ghost and are thrown into the pile of rotting flesh in the woods behind the brothel.

Angel is entrusted with the task of getting the other girls ready when Viktor is informed that customers are on the way. This entails injecting them with drugs and hastily applying a few dabs of makeup to their dirty faces. When the clients have gone Angel is also the one who must clean up the other girls’ battered, bruised, and often very bloody bodies. She keeps her head down and performs her tasks without any signs of emotion until a girl called Vanya (Dominique Provost-Chalkley) arrives at the house.

Vanya knows how to use sign language because her father was deaf, so the two girls develop a bond and Angel begins making secret visits to Vanya’s room by negotiating the crawlspace between the walls and entering via the air grid.

Things come to a head when the soldiers who murdered Angel’s mother return to the brothel and she witnesses her new friend being brutally raped. The soldier has wedged a piece of wood under the door handle to prevent anyone from helping Vanya if she screams too loudly, but his action also prevents his friends from coming to his rescue when Angel crawls from the wall and plunges her knife into him. He’s a big guy, so he takes a lot of killing, but she gets there in the end and is soon playing a game of cat and mouse with the other soldiers, who are keen to avenge his death.

The Seasoning House is a good film, but some viewers may find the subject matter offensive. Despite its theme and setting, it isn’t filled with scenes of sex and carnal overindulgence, but it’s never nice to see people being forced to live like animals and being treated like commodities.

There are only a couple of sex scenes in The Seasoning House. It’s not a sexploitation movie; it’s a film about people being exploited. The most graphic scene is the one where Vanya is raped and ultimately killed. It’s a disturbing scene that is more violent than erotic and serves the important purpose of encouraging Angel to take action against her oppressors.

Viewers who are nervous about needles may also find a few scenes in The Seasoning House make them shudder and an early scene in the film, where Viktor Victor exerts his authority over a new batch of girls by choosing one at random and cutting open her throat, is particularly nasty. The mind boggles at how the special effects department made the action seem so real, but, bearing in mind who directed the film, such graphic realism is probably only to be expected.

The only real problem with The Seasoning House is it does not explain how the soldiers and Viktor get away with their crimes. The soldiers appear to be able to just march into a village kill everyone they don’t need and then cart away the young girls. Then there are all those decomposing bodies stinking up the woods—and nobody is asking any questions? It seems a little far-fetched.

Then when Angel escapes everyone she meets is either involved with what is going on or just allows everything the soldiers do to go unchallenged. Nevertheless, there’s not a lot wrong with The Seasoning House. The end is a little disappointing but it’s better than that of many bigger budget productions and, if nothing else, the film offers something a little different from the norm.