Cut off from the world by war, a small psychiatric hospital finds life relatively unchanged, that is until the staff desert it and the patients find themselves their own keepers. House of Fools is at times life affirmingly crazy and touchingly poignant. Though easy to draw comparisons with ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' this is not a story about the inadvertent fascism of an institutional ‘caring' beaurocracy but the dangers of an encroaching and largely ambivalent outside world. A rare and original movie.