Luke´s character, Taylor Bottles, was left quite distant throughout the movie, but I suppose it was because of the way his part was written for the movie.
Yes, exactly. The film is told entirely from Jennifer's point of view, and she clearly has mixed feelings about her husband. In fact, the same can be said about the other major characters. Her mother is almost absurdly monstrous; Walter is unkind and brutally frank (as Jennifer is toward him). The only person she interacts with sympathetically is her equally damaged neighbor.
We are given so little background on these people that we see them only through Jennifer's eyes, and she is seriously screwed up and thus unreliable. We shouldn't assume that the situations are exactly as presented because the narrator is unreliable.
Luke, for example - this is a man who came home to find his wife trying to abort their child. How can that not have an effect on his relationship with her? And yet, when we see him interacting with others, he seems nice enough. And he didn't leave her or have her committed to psychiatric care, which would have been amply justified. He also gets along with her mother, which suggests that Mom is not quite as bad as Jennifer perceives her.
If Luke actually loves his wife - which we don't know because we only see things from her POV - why would he take her back to a mother as overtly abusive as Meredith seems to be in Jennifer's perception? Probably he wouldn't, so either Luke is a fake who enjoys hurting his wife and has a thing for her mom ... or Jennifer is seeing everything through a black haze of mental illness of some kind.
I admit to finding Jennifer hard to like. While Emily Goss' performance was excellent, I did not sympathize much with her character. That zombie-like stare, flat affect and obsession about her life in Chicago all suggested to me that she had serious mental problems, including a very negative self-image. While I could feel sorry for her if she were a nicer person, in fact she does come across exactly as Luke describes her toward the end: someone who is utterly focused on herself. Walter saw this, too; if we are meant to see him as the movie's Greek chorus, then his evident dislike for Jennifer suggests that we are not supposed to see her as entirely sympathetic.
The baby's well-being is not the only thing that matters, but it does matter, and I think Luke is more than justified in believing that Jennifer is a threat to their child.
None of this makes House on Pine Street a bad film. Actually, it was quite good except the ending, which was disappointing.
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