Based on a story by Honore de Balzac, the esoteric and prolific Raoul Ruiz turns his camera to genre filmmaking with his latest, a horror film about an old house and its former occupants. In the late 1930s, William James, a wealthy American living in Paris with his wife Anne-Marie, packs up and heads to the Andean Cordillera in southern Chile when James-while gambling-wins a villa there. Upon arrival at the house, James and his wife meet the family still living there-even though the family is dead. Traces of Ruiz’s characteristic surrealism and unconventional, experimental narrative structure recalling his earlier Time Regained and Klimt, filter through Nucingen Haus, to create a horror film only Ruiz could have envisioned.