After picking up the trailer for the psychological horror film "The Night House," I was left with a few clear expectations: a haunted house story, a malevolent apparition, some spooky atmosphere, and (if we're lucky) some real chills. Feel. What I didn't expect was a meaningful character study within an entertaining genre film and starring one of my favorite performances of the year so far.
Rebecca Hall is no stranger to great performances and some of her best have largely gone unnoticed. Her work in 2016's "Christine" and 2017's "Professor Marston and the Wonder Woman" are prime examples. In "The Night House" she carries most of the weight, appearing in practically every scene and imbuing the story with a relatable center for the audience.
Hall plays Beth, a schoolteacher in Upstate New York, whom we first meet only after her husband, Owen, inexplicably took his own life. The couple had been happily married for 14 years, but now Beth finds herself haunted by abandoned, fond memories and a cryptic suicide note, which leaves her with more questions than answers.
Her best friend Claire (a really good Sarah Goldberg) and a concerned neighbor Mel (Vondy Curtis-Hall) pay her visits and encourage her to move on with her life. But Beth mostly keeps herself, with her sadness, anger, and panic, inside the large double-decker lake house Owen built for them. But terrible disturbances at night (because that's when things like this happen in the movies) lead Beth (and us) to question whether she's really single. Maybe it's too much alcohol. Is it his misguided psyche playing tricks on him? Or has Owen returned from the grave?
"The Night House" is directed by David Brueckner, who has shown himself to be a smart and sensible genre filmmaker. Check out his contributions to horror compilations like "V/H/S" and "Southbound", as well as his debut single, "The Ritual". Here Brueckner takes some familiar tricks and uses them to great effect—a stereo suddenly playing by itself, loud raps at the door in the middle of the night, creepy silhouettes that disappear into the shadows. Aided by cinematographer Elisha Christian's clever camerawork and Ben Lovett's uneasy score, Brueckner creates a chilling sense of dread that is heightened each evening as Beth falls asleep.
While Brueckner & Co. is clearly having a great time that haunts us, the film works well because it never strays from its main focus — Beth's state of mind. The script (co-written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski) fills us with depression and her past struggles with "dark thoughts" and how it was Owen "who kept them at bay."
But Beth isn't perceived as an emotionally vulnerable girl in supernatural and psychological distress. He has patience and we get a good idea of it in the opening scene where a grieving parent visits him in school. We also see it when she finds clues in her husband's belongings that point to a possible secret life—the pictures on his phone, the confusing scribbles on the margins of equally confusing books, here. Even magic signs.
Against the advice of others, Beth searches deeper, discovering discoveries that test her mettle and push her closer to the cosmic brink. Meanwhile a seemingly sinister presence heightens her terror, resembling a "gaslighting" husband one minute and more diabolical the next.
Collins and Piotrowski do a great job keeping things under wraps, leaving a trail full of clues for breadcrumbs (with a few variations) for our minds to follow. Plus, Brueckner makes great use of his space to satisfy our apprehension. The opening shots offer some delightful teases—a dinghy sitting in the lake rhythmically hitting the dock, the soothing high-pitched sounds of wind chimes, a steady but gentle breeze that whispers through the tall oak treetops. But any notion of serenity quickly evaporates, overtaken by growing feelings of isolation and hopelessness that Brueckner deftly pulls out of his otherwise picturesque setting.
"The Night House" premiered at Sundance in 2020 and it doesn't take long to see why Searchlight Pictures swooped in and dropped $12 million for distribution rights. It is a highly satisfying horror thriller that fully embraces elements of its genre, while also deftly tackling some heavy themes like mortality, depression, grief and suicide. Some details of the story could be a bit sloppy in the final act and the ending could be a touch too clean for some flavor. But the deeper the filmmakers dug into the crumbling psychology of the main character, the more I appreciated what they were going to do.
And any opportunity to see Rebecca Hall play a soulful role like this is a treat in itself.