Cinematic Releases: The Night House (2020) - Reviewed

Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

 

Writer-director David Bruckner is probably best remembered for his infamous and terrifying short segment Amateur Night from the anthological found-footage horror film V/H/S involving a group of friends looking for sex and debauchery who inadvertently unleash a deadly succubus.  Currently at work on a reboot of Clive Barker’s seminal 1987 horror classic Hellraiser, the director has been working in the horror genre since 2007 with his ultraviolent cult horror debut The Signal.  His latest effort The Night House, another picture to be delayed for almost a year due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, finds the director in familiar territory with arguably the most grief stricken psychological and/or supernatural horror film of its kind since Ari Aster’s Hereditary.

Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

 
Local children’s schoolteacher Beth (Rebecca Hall) lives alone in her lake house her late husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) built for her before unexpectedly taking his own life.  In mourning, she copes by drowning her sorrows in booze when she isn’t lashing out during parent-teacher conferences or dumping on her friends and neighbors.  A cross and lonely woman irreparably damaged by her husband’s death, she begins experiencing increasingly bizarre and disturbing visions of some sort of presence in her home.  Could it be Owen from beyond the grave or something else entirely?  Grappling with her own growing hysteria and growing paranoia over just what triggered her husband’s suicide, she starts rifling through his belongings for clues.  What she uncovers about her husband’s past and the house they lived in seems to suggest that some secrets are best left hidden.
 
Co-produced by David S. Goyer and co-written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski aided by a strong and committed central performance from Rebecca Hall who makes the widowed Beth a tragic and at times monstrous figure, The Night House though a bit of a slowly burning puzzle of a horror movie is overall an effective jump scare fest.  Most of the film consists of Rebecca Hall in the labyrinthine and seemingly interdimensional household as loud thuds, knockings, floors creaking and stereos turning themselves on permeate the soundtrack.  Between loud abrupt gunshots to a jump scare that seems to scream for almost a minute, The Night House is a psychological thriller and character study that also wants to be a funhouse with a scary clown with an axe chasing you about.

Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

 
One of the film’s great strengths are the technical merits, ranging from the scenic as well as claustrophobic widescreen photography by Elisha Christian to reuniting the director with his longtime musical collaborator Ben Lovett who creates a somber, creepy and eventually frightening mood.  While not all of it comes together clearly (the third act packs one too many twists and turns), the film nevertheless works at creating a sense of unfocused dread as we’re not sure if we’re witnessing a genuine supernatural event or if the film’s heroine is simply losing her mind.  Partially a mystery thriller, possibly a ghost story, The Night House offers a new spin on the ‘things-that-go-bump-in-the-night’ subgenre of horror that doesn’t quite go as far as the aforementioned Hereditary did with its uncompromisingly brutal shocks but in its own right comes pretty close.

--Andrew Kotwicki