Housebound

Gerard Johnstone wrote and directed Housebound, a New Zealand comedy-horror-thriller released in 2014. Kylie Bucknell, played by Morgana O'Reilly, is placed under home detention after a botched burglary and must serve it in the house where she grew up, alongside her talkative mother Miriam, played by Rima Te Wiata. Miriam insists the place is haunted, a claim Kylie dismisses until odd noises and unexplained events make her less certain. Because leaving would violate her sentence, she cannot simply walk away from whatever is in the house. Glen-Paul Waru, Ross Harper, Cameron Rhodes and Millen Baird also appear.

The film was Johnstone's first feature. He followed it with M3GAN in 2022 and M3GAN 2.0 in 2025, making this the earliest of the three films he has directed. Ant Timpson and Luke Sharpe produced, and 123 crew members are credited. It runs 111 minutes.

Housebound holds a critics' rating of 7.7 out of 10 from 43 reviews, higher than its audience scores: 6.7 out of 10 on IMDb from around 40,000 votes and 6.6 out of 10 on TMDB from roughly 937 votes. Those figures suggest a film that reviewers received more warmly than general viewers, though the audience response remains positive overall.