Our House (film): A decent plot but kinda low budget

I'm still in pursuit of a good horror movie on Netflix and Our House sounded like it might fit the bill as it involves a scientist of sorts whose intentions are good but he accidentally opens a kinda gateway that allows evil spirits to emerge into his life.

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Ethan (Thomas Mann) is a student-scientist whose parents have recently been killed in a car accident. He must leave college to look after his younger siblings and handle his parents' estate. While at home he continues to tinker with a project he has been working on that is meant to generate wireless electricity.

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Although he doesn't mean to do so, he accidentally ends up communicating with his deceased parents during one of the trials. At first he is ecstatic about this breakthrough but later, as a horror movie should do, it is revealed that he has let other things through as well. Spirits that are not as kind as his parents.

The movie is decent, but it suffers from a very low budget. The acting is decent but nothing particularly noteworthy. I do like the way that they used an obviously low budget to have a favorite toy of the young girl in the house become animated without actually animating it. It simply follows her around the house and occasionally flees around the corner, probably done by some strings rather than using expensive CGI. I thought it was creative and with the music it achieved a pretty scary effect for nearly free.

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There are typical plot points that are a little "meh" such as the young daughter not being afraid of the ghosts and has the ability to see them all the time, and the older brother being kind of unaware / unbelieving that the exist at all (at least i think it was a boy, the actor is very androgynous) also there is a hidden room that has been in plain sight in the basement for all the years that this family has lived there and I always find that to be corny.

The movie has some nicely done dread buildup using shadows and smoke monsters that probably consumed a vast majority of the overall budget. It isn't overused and remains scary when it does happen. It loses points by having rather typical aspects of horror movies and well, it kind of drones on in the middle because like many films, it needed tobe 90 minutes long but I don't think they really had enough material to make that happen. I can't find any statistics about how much money it had or if it lost some in the end. I would imagine that since they were picked up by Netflix that it made something decent.

On a scale of "Urgh!" to "Wowsers!" I give Our House an overall rating of....