The Night House: Creepy Psychological Drama Explores Grief as the Horror Show It Is
By Kim Hughes
Rating: A
Dread and uncertainty saturate The Night House, a psychological thriller-cum-supernatural horror that leverages grief, and the particularly abject miseries endured by those surviving a suicide, to amplify its anxiety.
Its arguably ambiguous ending makes the film even more unsettling. Sometimes, there just isn’t a resolution, it seems to be saying. Or maybe there are some resolutions just too weird and awful to bear. Also, marriage is a minefield, huh?
The Night House opens on the day Beth (Rebecca Hall, again playing an American flawlessly) returns home from burying her husband Owen, comfort-food casserole in hand. Once alone, Beth tips the casserole into the trash; the first clue she marches to her own beat.
Soon, Beth is tipping back booze and watching home movies that establish the happiness the couple seemed to share. That, and the beautiful lakeside house Owen built for Beth in a New York state of long shadows and eerie quiet. At first, Beth occupies the house like a phantom, unsure where to be or how to be there as the dark reality of her new life takes shape. And then nightmares descend.
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Soon, Beth is going through Owen’s things, digital and otherwise, trying to figure out what happened. What she finds is invariably… off. Images of other women, oddball floorplans, sketches, and other sinister-looking stuff. Also, there seems to be another, as-yet-unfinished house across the lake that Owen was building.
As her friend Claire (Sarah Goldberg) watches nervously from the sidelines —sensing that a deep dive into a dead-by-suicide husband’s private life can yield nothing good — an increasingly obsessive Beth plows tirelessly forward, chasing leads that point to horrendous possibilities.
Director David Bruckner (The Ritual) borrows broadly from the horror playbook to keep his audience off-balance. Is this a haunted house story, a ghost story, a widow-losing-her-mind story? Some combination of it all wrapped up in foreboding claustrophobia? Resolutions become somewhat clearer after a deeply disturbing climax that, in a righteous world, would become a meme.
The movie rests almost entirely on Hall, equal parts devasted and furious, bereft yet relentless as she drills down into a shop girl who knew Owen and whose encounters with him seem to corroborate the dark secrets that led to his violent death.
Hall is terrific.
A key scene where Beth goes to the half-finished house across the lake in the middle of the night during a rainstorm while drunk would seem preposterous if Hall didn’t portray Beth with such clarion commitment to descending the rabbit hole of discovery, consequences be damned.
Read our interview with Rebecca Hall
Taken either as a metaphor for mourning or as a straight-up fictional narrative with a paranormal bent, The Night House’s ending is as disturbing — and intriguing — as it gets.
The Night House. Directed by David Bruckner. Starring Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg, and Vondie Curtis-Hall. In theatres August 20.