This Brutal House

The most watchable episode of Cabinet of Curiosities, the Guillermo del Toro–produced Netflix anthology, is the penultimate one. Meaning the seventh one; don’t be tempted to look into the others. Key to my enjoyment of “The Viewing Party” is the setting: a conversation pit to end conversation pits, buried deep within a billionaire’s private bunker. The interior stylings may be a Verner Panton pastiche, all hedonistic reds and glowing inset lighting panels, and the music hauntological fusion-funk, but the architecture? “It’s clearly Brutalism in the Mueller tradition. But there are subtle Aztec influences,” says one of the invited guests, nonsensically. I had mistaken the brief shots of the exteriors for a digitally modified Errol Kirsch House, a concrete anthill built in a Chicago suburb in 1982, three years after “Viewing Party” takes place. (In fact, the episode was shot on a Toronto soundstage.)

I was better while watching Archive 81, another Netflix series that prestige-ly plays with rotten horror tropes. Protagonist Dan Turner (Mamoundou Athie) loses his shit i…