In the 2021 film A House on the Bayou, we meet a suburban couple, John and Jessica Chambers, and their fourteen-year-old daughter Anna. The husband and wife have professional careers – she is a realtor and he is a creative writing professor – and we come upon their lives at the moment that she is confronting him about his infidelity, complete with color photos. The wife’s solution for a path forward is to get away from their life in Houston and spend a month in an isolated vacation home that will go up for sale soon. In this locale, they encounter an old man and his teenage grandson who operate a small grocery store. And that’s where the real trouble begins. A House on the Bayou explores a common fear: what if rural Southerners really are as bad as city folks believe they could be?

The narrative in A House on the Bayou rests almost all of its weight on mainstream American culture’s fear of being isolated in the rural South. The events are set into motion by wife Jessica’s discovery of husband John sexual affair with one of his students, followed by her decision to address the infidelity with a getaway to a luxurious home in a backwater place. Certainly, the time away from their normal life will allow for a different perspective, but it will also take them away from all of the supports they have, including good coverage on their cell phones and access to grocery stores. This leads to their interaction with Grandpappy, the owner of a small store, and Isaac, his eighteen-year-old grandson. Both men are immediately  intimidating to John: Grandpappy with his big white beard, rough clothing, and chilly demeanor, and Isaac who immediately and intensely sets his sights on Anna. On their visit to the store, John remarks to Anna that they must seem like city slickers, and Anna replies that they are city slickers. John, a suburbanite creative writing professor who drives a shiny new SUV, certainly realizes that he is out of his element. He is obviously wary of Grandpappy, who silently acknowledges his lies to Anna about what they don’t stock in the store, and of Isaac, who is too old to be hitting on his daughter. But John has a problem. He knows that, from his position, these are people he doesn’t want to tangle with.

What weight the film doesn’t place on that fear of the rural South it places on commonly held beliefs about a hellfire-and-brimstone archetype of a Southern Christian, one who judges harshly and without compromise and who exerts violent punishment without mercy. John and Jessica may have left their comfortable suburban life behind, but they did not leave their sins behind. John has cheated on his wife, and Jessica is intolerably overbearing. Though Jessica would seem like the victim at first, it becomes clear through the dialogue that she is harsh and difficult as a wife. In Biblical terms, she is a Lilith figure. And this is where Grandpappy and Isaac come in. On that first (and only) visit to the store, Grandpappy scrawls “The Devil Is Watching You” on their receipt. John doesn’t know how to interpret – or respond to – this at first, but soon Grandpappy explains it to him: we carry our sins with us everywhere we go, and the Devil sees them as opportunities. The story then morphs into a mixture of Deep Southern, Old Testament justice and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Tension is alleviated somewhat with the revelation that John believes that he has hired Isaac to kill Jessica while they are out there, but the scenario flips back to a blend of magical realism and terrifying irony when Isaac does not follow John’s plan. After all, Grandpappy and Isaac are men of the rural Deep South, ones who will not be told what to do, who cannot be controlled, who are willing and able to do violence, and who have their own sense of morals and justice. 

What is also interesting about the film’s portrayals is how rootless the suburban Chambers family appears to be. When Jessica presents John with the evidence of his cheating, neither of them reference the effects on or responses of extended family or friends. In Jessica’s brief monologue about her pain, the only family that she alludes to consists of herself, her husband, and her daughter. She makes no mention of parents, siblings, cousins, nobody.  Neither of the adults seem to have any friends, beyond John’s college-student mistress. So they just leave. John the professor walks away from his classes, and Jessica the realtor walks away from any listings she might have. What is even more noticeable is that, once they arrive at the isolated villa, their daughter never once mentions her friends, her soccer season, or even being in school! I interpret this as a commentary on the shallowness of suburban living. It wouldn’t have taken much to write some allusions to a normal life into the dialogue, but the writer-director here chose not to.  As far as we can tell,  this little family can leave suddenly and be gone for a month, and no one will miss them. Nor will they miss anyone. 

It is hard to tell whether A House on the Bayou is a thriller about the consequences of marital infidelity or whether it is a horror movie about the supernatural beings that haunt backwater places. Throughout the story, the sense of which one it might be wavers back and forth, though – spoiler alert! – the ending may clear it up. The house is not actually real, and Grandpappy and Isaac are revealed to be vengeful spirits and/or arbiters of justice, somewhat in line with the angels of the Old Testament. Before our modern myths about beneficent winged men in white robes, angels were messengers and enforcers; sometimes that was good news, and sometimes that meant bad things were coming . . . as in the Passover. In this narrative, John and Jessica carry their sins to the out-of-the-way site, and even their innocent daughter must suffer by witnessing the consequences of her parents’ actions. And, as with so many characters in the Bible, an old man who runs a little store and his swarthy grandson are unlikely people to be called on by God to mete out justice while riding around the bayou in an old short-bed pickup. In the end, even local law enforcement relies on these mystical figures to make sure that everything works out as it should.