The Furniture: 10 Favorite Sets of 2020

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

Our year in review list-making continues but this is not a “Best Production Design” list. The thing about production design is that it's hard to compare. Obviously all films are collaborative, but at least in such Oscar categories as “Best Original Score” and “Best Actress” you’re focusing on the work of easily identifiable individuals. “Production design” is the combined achievement of a whole slew of production designers, art directors, and set decorators, and more.

But beyond that, different productions task designers with using wildly different tools. How do you compare sets built on a soundstage to the careful decoration of a real historic home? The physical sets of period pieces with the digitally-conceived spaces of science fiction? Animation! It’s dizzying.

So herewith this is a list of ten favorite movie sets of 2020, using the loosest definition possible. It’s in alphabetical order, because ranking is stressful. Enjoy...

Three Unsettling Houses - La Llorona, The Nest and Shirley

Any house can be haunted, even if it’s not technically in a horror movie. Shirley Jackson seems determined to haunt her own house in Shirley, tossing eggs on the patterned linoleum and casting nightmares into the wallpaper. The English country mansion in The Nest, meanwhile, threatens both the marriage and the finances of a miserably posh-adjacent couple.

But the spookiest is the one in the genuine horror film, Jayro Bustamante’s brilliant La Llorona. The house in question is actually more of a compound, home to retired dictator Enrique Monteverde (a thinly veiled Efraín Ríos Montt), on trial for the Guatemalan genocide of the early 1980s. Great use is made of walls and water, eroding a fortress that might be able to fend off crowds of protestors, but remains vulnerable to the supernatural echoes of violence.

Bacurau - The Museum

If this were a ranked list tthe Museu Historico de Bacurau would probably be at the top. It’s a simple, a two-room historical society museum in tiny (fictional) Bacurau, Brazil. People are constantly avoiding historical museums like this, places that so often devolve into a shared attic for local families. But in Bacurau, it holds a dusty lesson in the importance of knowing your history. Nestled in with the rusty sewing machines, sad irons and folk art is a bloody archive of rural resistance - and the guns still work. These Nazi lunatics picked the wrong town.

Dick Johnson Is Dead - Dick in Heaven

Documentaries can have great production design, too! (Recently The Missing Picture, Casting JonBenet and The Nightmare, to name a few.) In Dick Johnson Is Dead, Kirsten Johnson stages her father’s (not yet arrived) demise for the camera, over and over again. And while it’s hard to pick just one moment, the exuberance and charm of the film hits a peak in the fantastical soundstage dreamscape of Dick Johnson in Heaven, enjoying a chocolate fountain and hanging out with Frida and Farrah.

Divine Love - Drive-Thru Church

Divine Love is a parable of a not-so-distant future, a pastel dystopia of fundamentalist Christianity on the ascent in Brazil. There’s a lot of clever design, from the walk-through pregnancy detectors to the culty pink decor of the underground marrieds-only support group. But my favorite detail is the prayer drive through, a perfect metaphor for the “minimal effort, maximum smugness” attitude of Evangelical culture.

On a Magical Night - Room 212

The best thing about Christophe Honoré’s comedy of marital discord is the production design. Maria (Chiara Mastroianni) flees an argument with her husband and checks into the hotel across the street. But Room 212 (the film’s French title) turns out not to be a refuge, but rather an enchanted fun house of relationships past and present. Honoré regularly reminds us that it is, in fact, a set. But this awareness is carefully designed to mimic the abstraction of theater, where the audience can understand a set as an extension of a character’s psychology. It works beautifully.

Tesla - The Colorado Lab

I’ve written about this already, and there’s something to be said for nearly every bizarre, TED-talk adjacent set in the film. But my favorite is the barn-like laboratory that Tesla sets up in Colorado, all light wood and blue shadows. It’s the perfect atmosphere for a genius teetering on the edge of science fiction, waiting for lightning to strike

The Twentieth Century - The Labyrinth

Every detail of The Twentieth Century’s design is thrilling and ridiculous, so it feels sort of beside the point to pick a single set. The entire film is a delirious romp through a counterfactual Canadian landscape, collapsing great distances and folding everything into a snowy labyrinth, with an architecture that feels a bit like Lawren Harris in Brutalist Lego. But, given that, I think its culmination is in the climactic race through the maze - an expressionist extravaganza on Canadian Themes.

The Wolf House - The House

This is a fourth unsettling house, for sure, but it’s an entirely different sort of design achievement. The Wolf House is a stop motion fable based on the story of Colonia Dignidad, an isolated compound founded by emigré Nazis in rural Chile, the leaders of which perpetrated abuse on their own members and collaborated with Augusto Pinochet in the torture and murder of dissidents. Director/art directors Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León, along with art director Natalia Geisse, have taken their titular house and used it as a canvas. The resulting phantasmagoria is painted right on the walls and furniture, underlining how hidden and self-contained this horror was allowed to be - and how its remoteness continues to be an obstacle to justice today.

What were your favourite sets of the film year?

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Comments

[Cash]

I thought pretty much every hotel in The Queen's Gambit was amazing. I know it's a TV series, but I had to mention it.

[NATHANIEL R]

loved this. was such a superb year for "haunted houses"... i'd add the ever geographically shifting RELIC to this list.

my own fav sets included BEANPOLE's apartment, FIRST COW's ramshackle hut, and the dripping-with-wealth apartment in SWALLOW.

[NATHANIEL R]

loved this. was such a superb year for "haunted houses"... i'd add the ever geographically shifting RELIC to this list.

my own fav sets included BEANPOLE's apartment, FIRST COW's ramshackle hut, and the dripping-with-wealth apartment in SWALLOW.

[César Gaytán]

I like the fluffy padded country town and the psychodelic shining funky kingdom of Trolls World Tour but I guess non of them count exactly as a set.

Anyway, my favorite set is the reinterpretation of the Isola delle Rose of L'incredibile Storia dell'Isola delle Rose (Rose Island)

[PP]

The house in Swallow
The cinema theater after the end of Tenet

[Jesus Alonso]

on TV, Avenue 5's spaceship... jawdropping.

[NATHANIEL R]

Pp -- I see what you did there and applaud it!

[Ben Allen]

Though not specific to 2020, we've been watching prior seasons of Blacklist, an ongoing show that has many striking interior designs ranging from industrial to world class posh with everything in between!