In the movie The Shipping News, a benign, atmospheric romantic piece starring Kevin Spacey and Julianne Moore quirkily working out a banal living in the blighted landscape of a rough-hewn Newfoundland fishing village, there's this house. It's the ancestral home of the main character Coyle, played by Spacey, and his aunt played by Judi Dench. The familial lore is that, maybe a hundred and fifty years before, the family was cast out of their original settlement at a location miles further up-coast and rather than leave the house they'd built, they decided to gather the whole clan together and drag it across the snow and ice and plant it in the new place. It's later revealed that the family was ostracized and cast away because they were building false guiding pyres on the rocky outcrops to lure ships who would think them to be waypoints of safe sailing so that they'd run aground against the crags and then be prone to raiding and looting, which, inevitably, would also result in killing any objectors aboard those victimized vessels.
A big part of some of the quirky and somewhat vague mystery of the movie is that the house was anchored down by large guy wires ostensibly to prevent it from, perhaps, slipping off into the sea from its cliffside locale during a fierce Newfoundland storm. For Coyle's young child, the house also "spoke" to her through the humming song that the guy wires sang when the wind blew around them. Kinda messed up and it culminates in the ending of the film when after a pretty wild stormy night, the next morning it's discovered the house has uprooted the guy wires and broke free and is nowhere to be found. The end. No explanation. Come up with your own conclusion.
Well lo and behold! I think we found the house!
It's a little smaller now, having whittled itself down into a single-wide trailer. And it's right next door!
I better start singing my seas shanties. I guess I'd rather become one of them than be their next victim.
