Vestron Pictures
For directors with “weird” sensibilities, winning over movie critics is hugely important. Unfortunately, in 2026, this has all been boiled down to getting your film a “Certified Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which can be incredibly misleading since the website has approved far too many critics, many of whom have rigidly mainstream tastes. This also makes it difficult for odd and/or challenging films to break through.
It was a much different deal back in the 1980s. Just about all major newspapers had more than one film critic on staff, as did news magazines like Time and Newsweek. And while some of these writers used a star-ranking system to give people a quick sense of what they felt about a given movie, you still had to read them to figure out if said movie was something you might dig. (And most reviewers were very good about not spoiling key plot points.)
Still, for small films with tiny marketing budgets and no bona fide movie stars, there was nothing more valuable than getting two thumbs up from Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. Though I blame Ebert especially for having inspired Rotten Tomatoes, he and Siskel loved movies and were at their very best when championing great films that were in danger of getting overlooked. Ebert was particularly good at this when he wrote his reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times. Here, he had more space to muse over a strange movie’s peculiar qualities. And he never did this better than in his four-star review for Bernard Rose’s “Paperhouse,” an exhilaratingly bizarre fantasy horror film that defies simple description. His support was integral to getting me to rent the movie in 1989.
Ebert believed Paperhouse was a movie to ‘be surrendered to’
Vestron Pictures
Four years before he made the franchise-launching horror classic “Candyman,” Bernard Rose was a prodigiously gifted music video director (he did Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax”) preparing to make his first proper feature. He couldn’t have picked a stranger project than “Paperhouse.” Based on Catherine Storr’s children’s novel “Marianne Dreams,” the film centers on Anna Madden (Charlotte Burke), an 11 year old who, addled by a high fever, begins to dream of things she’s drawn while awake. It starts with a house, but things get unnerving when, after drawing a face peering from a window, she encounters Marc (Elliott Spears), who is afflicted with muscular dystrophy and exists in real life.
“This is not a movie to be measured and weighed and plumbed, but to be surrendered to,” Roger Ebert wrote in his review. I couldn’t agree more. The film unfolds as an uneasy dream that’s forever on the verge of turning into a full-blown nightmare (and it gets there sometimes). As Anna and Marc’s bond strengthens, Anna uses her dreams as a means of escaping her sad reality, which includes a distant, alcoholic father (Ben Cross). She yearns to run off with Marc, but his worsening condition makes this impossible.
Rose’s film is refreshingly unpredictable and consistently enchanting. You just have to go with it. As Ebert wrote:
“Paperhouse” is not in any sense simply a children’s movie, even though its subject may seem to point it in that direction. It is a thoughtfully written, meticulously directed fantasy in which the actors play their roles with great seriousness. Watching it, I was engrossed in the development of the story and found myself accepting the film’s logic on its own terms.
“Paperhouse” is currently streaming on Prime Video.