A House in the Hills

Alex, a young actress, is house-sitting a luxurious villa in Bel Air in Hollywood to earn some extra money. Her plan was to spend the weekend rehearsing lines for a soap opera screen test. However, Alex gets involved in a drama of hostages and mix ups after she discovers that a murder has been committed in the house next door recently ...

COMMENTARY
Is there a woman who wouldn't want to bowl somebody over with a line such as, '' I'm not the woman you think I am?'' And get the final say, although she might not be taken seriously.
Alex in A House in the Hills is one of the few people who meet the requirements to transform those inclinations from theory into practice. She is young, beautiful and lives within suitable walking distance of America's most wealthy neighbourhoods. Her main goal in life is to become a soap opera star. Except for a few auditions, she still hasn't managed to convince the TV-people that she is the right woman for the part.
While waiting for her big break she works as a waitress in a restaurant where she sometimes lends an ear to the customers and their stories. Her work in the restaurant is not enough to base a soap
opera character on, and she has begun to realize that something is lacking in her. She is too human to be the perfect soap opera character. The surgically altered and liposuctioned Barbie dolls at the auditions she makes it to are miles and miles away from herself in appearance.
Alex is persuaded to house-sit for a weekend in a wealthy neighbourhood. The owners of the house, who could pass for two
well-adjusted relatives of the couple in Bitter Moon, are going away. The man of the house is a bored and frustrated rose fetishist. His wife is stylish and jealous and demands that Alex treats the house with the respect that she herself does not receive from her husband. After settling into the house Alex takes the opportunity to use the couple's props and act out her ambitions. She dresses up in the wife's lingerie and rehearses the role of a femme fatale taken from the script she brought along. However, the rehearsal is interrupted by the door-bell. A man posing as an exterminator demands to be let into the house. The dressed up Alex is forced to continue to play the game. When she tries to unmask herself she is not believed - against her will she has turned into her fictitious character.
Characters in the soap opera genre are never real people in the true sense of the word. In the same way as the characters in the Manhattan detective stories they could be described as modern archetypes; the good guys solve the cases while the evil guys try to stop them. What they are trying to achieve is always of less importance. It is how they knock their enemies - in other words which methods they use - that matters.
When Alex realizes what a dodgy situation she is in she uses the soap opera as a guideline for her actions in real life. The course of events in the millionaire's villa turns into a serious game, and in the end it turns out that reality is always one move ahead of the soap opera. ':'
Cristel Nyqvist