The Night House review: a horror haunted house with cosmic secrets


We mourn a loss together, but we cry alone. A horror movie where despair and depression are as formidable threats as any bogeyman, The house of the night It begins at the point where the duel ends and the duel begins, watching as Beth (Rebecca Hall), a school teacher in upstate New York, returns from the funeral of her husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit). A concerned friend walks her out the door, tells Beth to call her anytime, hands her a casserole, and then leaves without going in with her. As the sun sets over the nearby lake, Beth pauses, throws the pot in the trash, and then waits for night to come.

It may not come alone. Beth discovers that her nights are made uneasy by more than the loss of her husband. Strange noises wake her from sleep. What appear to be traces of blood mark the dock leading to the back door. One night, shadows of Personal shopper, he receives text messages from Owen, but when he wakes up, the messages have disappeared. Everything is extremely worrying. More troubling: Beth begins to wake up far from her bed, with no recollection of ever moving from place to place.

Written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski (the team behind the memorable 2017 film Super dark times) and directed by David Bruckner (part of the crew responsible for The signal Y V / H / S), The house of the night it is at the same time a story of a haunted house and a mystery. A surprising early scene reveals the details of Owen’s death through a tense conversation between Beth and a student’s father who is trying to push Beth into giving his son a higher grade, because after all, Beth was absent on the date she had scheduled an appointment. draft. Beth responds with unmasked hostility, telling the father that she was not available at the time because that was the day her husband rowed out to the middle of the lake and shot himself. And no, she doesn’t know why.

Rebecca Hall at The Night House, looks up in horror

Image: Searchlight Images

As the movie progresses, Beth begins to piece together the story behind the suicide, but each new detail only deepens the mystery. Owen was an architect who designed his house, but why do the plans contain other plans for a similar house? Why didn’t her friendly widowed neighbor Mel (Vondie Curtis-Hall) tell Beth that she sometimes saw Owen walking through the woods at night, at least once with another woman? Why does your library contain books on the occult? And who is that woman in the photograph on Owen’s phone, her head turned away from the camera? She could almost go through Beth, if Beth didn’t know better.

As the clues build, Bruckner doles out scares with increasing intensity, a template for haunted house movies dating back to at least 1944. The uninvited. It is executed with enough skill to make The house of the night it’s worth checking out for its technical merits alone, turning every corner of a luxurious lake house into a place of deep dread. But what’s memorable is the film’s interest in exploring ideas deeper than how terrifying it could be to be unexpectedly alone and seemingly surrounded by malevolent specters. The title has a literal meaning within the film, best left intact, but it also suggests the loneliness of Beth’s newly empty house and the shadows that threaten to engulf her, shadows that could be formidable threats even without the questions posed by the shocking. Owen’s death. .

Owen, Beth confesses to her friends, was the optimist of her marriage. She was the one prone to spiraling darkness. What is he supposed to do now? But while her friends worry about her, they also feel uneasy and impatient the more she talks about her loss. They offer bromides, dismiss her concerns, and steer her away from investigating Owen’s death. This kind of loss makes it difficult to know what to do, what advice to offer, and all of that sounds hollow to Beth’s ears anyway. However, its nocturnal visitors have no problem making themselves heard.

Rebecca Hall at The Night House, seen in the dark through a series of windows, from outside her home.

Photo: Searchlight Images

Hall plays Beth as a difficult woman who doesn’t always invite sympathy, even in her time of need. His pain takes the form of anger and suspicion. Behaves in a way that alienates other people. Even her best friend Claire (Sarah Goldberg) is unsure what to do, beyond staying present and listening. The film weaves a study of what it means to discover that you have built your life on an abyss in the fabric of a multiplex horror film, but it wouldn’t work without Hall’s skillful and complex acting. She plays Beth as a woman shocked at her loss, but the real horror lies in the way the secrets she uncovers seem to fuel her more self-destructive tendencies. When everything that gives your life meaning disappears, it begins to seem like a confirmation that everything could be meaningless. Maybe it’s time to pour another brandy and let the darkness in.

Enter a tension The house of the nightIt’s the home stretch as the demands of the genre begin to eat away at the ambiguity, at least to some extent. The film fully reveals what Owen was up to before his death, but what accompanies that revelation, particularly his connection to Beth’s past, can be read in two different ways, and the film cleverly refuses to tell them. viewers what to think. Although the final moments are sure to frustrate uncomfortable viewers with unanswered questions, the gray hue fits the theme. Sometimes it is not just the houses that are haunted, but also the people within their walls. Some ghosts cannot be easily eliminated or explained. We have to live with some of them.

The house of the night debuts in theaters on August 20.


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