In the late 1800s, a young girl named Mabel lives with her father Raymond, mother Penny, and newborn sister Isobel in relative poverty.

After a visit from wealthy, condescending relatives, Raymond wanders drunk into the forest at night and encounters the mysterious architect Mr. Van Schoonbeek.

Raymond becomes increasingly obsessed with the house's fireplace, which he constantly fails to light up, while Penny spends more and more time sewing drapes.

Mabel becomes further put off when her parents don attire designed by Van Schoonbeek which resembles the furniture they adore (a chair and curtains).

Using the curtains to climb out a window while their parents burn alive, Mabel and Isobel escape before watching the smoking house from a distance as the sun rises.

The story is set in the late 2000s, in world populated by anthropomorphic rodents, and the house is now settled in a developed city street and about to go up for sale.

Discovering the house has been infested by fur beetles and larvae, he uses copious amounts of boric acid to get rid of them, to no avail.

Over the next few days, the odd couple remains firmly settled in the house, the bugs return in force, and the bank keeps demanding repayment of the developer's business loan.

However, she struggles financially; and her only tenants, fisherman Elias and hippie Jen, do not pay rent despite her insistence; she consistently ignores their attempts to address the rising water.

Encouraged by Jen, Cosmos, and a returning Elias, Rosa takes control of the house ship, escaping as the floods destroy the surrounding foundations, and the four sail out into the ocean.

Nexus had three director teams lined up to tell a tale of three distinct family generations at the same house:[1] The duo of Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, and Paloma Baeza; the directors are credited for the story of their respective segments, with Johannes Nyholm as co-writer for the second.

[6] The project had originated at a meeting at producer Charlotte Bavasso's London home, where the four directors "brainstormed a bit and came up with this idea about a house in which different things are happening in different times.

The website's consensus reads: "Whether you're a fan of stop-motion animation or just looking for something deeply, alluringly weird, The House will feel like home.

[12] Dmitry Samarov of the Chicago Reader said the movie "sustains its momentum by varying the styles of storytelling and rarely stooping to either crassness or cutesiness.

She said the first segment is "by far the most successful of the trio", and that the second was "too underbaked to deliver any real horrors or work as a fable about violation, or capitalism or any of the other themes it seems at various moments to be nodding vaguely at."