Movie Reaction: The Night House

Formula: What Lies Beneath * Final Destination

 

Perhaps the oddest thing to radicalize me was the MTV show from the 2000s Room Raiders. The idea of the show was that a person would choose who to date after touring the three bedrooms of the suitors. This got me thinking about the idea of what people could learn about me while I wasn't around. That changed my labeling and organization habits tremendously and arguably created a monster. Ever since, I've also been a big fan of movies that explore ideas of what can be learned in the absence of another person. Searching is one of my favorite movies from the last few years because it’s all about finding clues from a person's computer. The parts of Me & Earl & The Dying Girl that devastate me are the parts about learning something new about a loved one after they are gone. Horror uses the same idea really well. We all have secrets. What if those secrets are sinister or at least spooky? That's where all the power of Lake Mungo comes from. The same basic idea drives The Night House.

 

The Night House is about Beth (Rebecca Hall). Her husband killed himself about a week before and she's dealing with the emotional fallout. She's not handling it well, as one would expect. At night, odd things start happening at her lake house. She sees things from the window. The stereo keeps turning on for no reason. She's getting communications from her dead husband. All evidence of these things is gone by morning, and she has been hitting the bottle pretty hard lately. Maybe she is just imagining things...but that suicide note he left her was pretty weird. As she starts investigating these odd occurrences, she uncovers odd activities her husband was up to. But what does it all mean?

 

I went into this movie knowing that it was a horror movie and nothing else. That's pretty ideal, since even my formula for this gives away some of the fun of the discovery in the story. The movie is packed with creepy imagery and unsettling mysteries. It has one of the better jump scares that I've seen in a while. A few actually and they feel earned. The mythology the film builds up is fun to untangle. I do think the film runs into an overexplaining problem toward the end. It's really hard to avoid that in a horror feature though, and it's not egregious over-explaining. The amount of resolution to the story is good. There's still a big mess to clean up, but I know enough about the end of Beth's story to feel satisfied.

 

Rebecca Hall is really good while playing against almost nothing for much of the film. Sarah Goldberg does show up as a concerned friend and Vondie Curtis-Hall does yeoman's work as the concerned neighbor. So much of it though is Hall exploring a room and looking confused, terrified, or sad.

 

The Night House isn't splashy indie horror in the A24 mold like a The Witch or Midsommar. It's closer to the studio-polished horror of a decade ago. Thanks to the setting, I thought a lot about The Uninvited and What Lies Beneath when I watched this. It turns out the director previously worked on V/H/S and Southbound, so of course I'd like it. That likely explains the movie's willingness to leave some really gnarly moral questions at the end.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

 

After the Credits

The husband sure is a thorny issue. It's sweet that he really loved his wife. They also point out that he stopped himself from killing the bookstore woman when she asked him to stop. Yet, Beth does find a bunch of other dead bodies in that mirror house. So, he's not exactly noble. I wish the movie could've found a way to make Beth cope with that a little more. These women were killed in her name as an expression of her husband's love. That's fucked up, but the movie is more concerned with her own attempts to elude this dark passenger than the awful deeds her husband did before that.