REVIEW: A House Made of Splinters [2023]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 87 minutes
Release Date: February 21st, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Giant Pictures
Director(s): Simon Lereng Wilmont

Our shelter is a house built of sorrow.

Just twenty kilometers from the frontline in Eastern Ukraine is a children’s shelter for displaced kids of violence, alcohol, and drugs. As the social workers explain, they rarely have any vacancies with the war raging and winter looming. When one girl or boy leaves (each can stay up to nine months before returning back home, being sent to an orphanage, or being given to a foster family), another is ready to take their place.

And the real tragedy is that many of those who spend time here will ultimately find their way back as a parent who unfortunately followed in the footsteps of their own. Because life isn’t getting any easier. Depression, abuse, and poverty rage on until everyone is a few bottles away from losing custody and feeding the same cycle that marked their youth.

Simon Lereng Wilmont’s A House Made of Splinters takes a fly-on-the-wall approach to get us inside those “walls of sorrow.” Narrated in spurts by the social workers, the film itself is composed of the children—namely four in Eva, Kolya, Sasha, and Polina. We watch them plug in their cellphones to ring their parents, the odds of someone answering dwindling to zero as the days go by.

Some act out in frustration. Some do everything in their power to stay positive and helpful in the hopes of finding an escape. And every time one does earn that chance to start over (either with another relative or a foster parent upon realizing their own aren’t changing enough to be redeemed), you can’t help feeling for those left behind. Because it’s not just about their own fate still being uncertain. It’s about their friends leaving and their “normal” being upended yet again.

You must commend these kids. These are impossible circumstances being captured on film regardless of whether they fully grasp what that means—especially now with an Oscar nomination adding exposure. We see some at their worst, trying to be better yet still possessed with a smirk when getting away with what they know isn’t good behavior. And we see most at their darkest, alone and contemplating a future that odds are won’t look anything like their past.

Do you hold out hope that your parents will turn things around? Or do you let the courts dissolve their rights to hopefully find someone who will? These kids are barely teens and younger deciding things they shouldn’t need to decide with the help of some of the only adults who ever truly listened and cared. This is a purgatory of healing run by saints whose necessary existence proves just how damaged our world remains.