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@journeywithacinephile
@ryan_the_nixon
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Film: The Night House
Year: 2020
Director: David Bruckner
Writer: Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski
Starring: Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg and Vondie Curtis-Hall
This was a movie that was getting quite the push. I’ve been going to the theater a lot as of late and both I go to were showing the trailer. It was even popping up on streaming services with commercials as well. Jaime and I got the chance to see this when the Gateway Film Center had an advanced screening to which we were able to get passes. To get into the movie itself, a widow begins to uncover her recently deceased husband’s disturbing secrets.
We start after the funeral of Owen (Evan Jonigkeit). He was married to Beth (Rebecca Hall) and she returns to the house they shared. It is even more interesting that he built the house as well. As someone who just lost their spouse, she is struggling. She has a restless night. There is a knock at the door and when she looks out, she thinks she sees someone. The problem is that there is no one there.
Beth is a teacher and she shows up late to meeting. Her best friend is also a teacher in Claire (Sarah Goldberg). She is shocked to see Beth, but Claire is glad she is keeping busy. We get an interesting scene from here where Beth is looking at things on her computer, glances at the clock and then shocked by a knock at her classroom door. She lost time and there’s a search for handguns on the screen of her laptop. She has a testy talk with the mother of one of her students from there.
More creepy things happen to her as well. She finds a watery footprint on the stairs up from their dock. Music turns on in the middle of the night. She also gets a phone call from her dead husband’s phone. When she looks out to the lake, she believes she sees him standing there, naked. This causes her to find his phone in the items she is getting rid of, but there isn’t a text or call from him. What she does find though is a picture of a woman that looks a lot like her.
This causes her to look more into things where Claire tells her not to. She believes that Beth should just let sleeping dogs lie. Things get quite weird when one night she gets into the boat and sees a house much like hers across the lake. The problem is we’ve seen earlier there is no house over there, just woods. The more she digs, the darker things become and her husband might not have been the man she originally thought.
That is where I’m going to leave my recap as I don’t want to spoil this movie. I also believe that people should seek this out. I had quite the experience in seeing this movie. If you know me, I’m sucked into the story. This movie pulls us in at first with the emotion. We have Beth who thought things were good between her and Owen. He was the rock. She was the one who dealt with depression, but he is the one who killed himself. Plus, there is a line in the trailer that he did it with a gun she didn’t know he had. There is more to this story though.
There are elements here of the supernatural. Owen has a sketchbook for plans as it seems like he was a foreman or worked construction or he was an architect, something along those lines. As Beth goes through it, it seems normal. The deeper she goes though she finds plans like their house, just a mirror to it. She also finds that he had books about the occult. This is something else she didn’t know her husband was into. What I like is that there is a way to look at this as a supernatural thing. We could be dealing with a mirror of our own world where we have our characters, but just a darker version of them. This could be parallel worlds as well here. Another thing is that there could be a darker entity that Beth fears is after her. There is another way to look at this movie as well.
The other way would be that this movie is an allegory for depression. Beth admits that she deals with this. Owen was her rock, but I could see that her condition could have worn on him. There is also the idea that the things he is doing could also have weighed on him, leading him to do what he did. This dark entity that Beth believes she sees could be her depression as a manifestation. All the supernatural things happen to her only. At the end of the movie, this is what I told Jaime where she believes it is the other explanation that it is supernatural. What I like here is that the movie allows you to decide.
What I think makes this movie work though is the performance from Hall. She does great at being this character that just has had her world shattered. She is trying to hold things together. In dealing with her grief we see her get angry and then depressed. It is things I’ve gone through myself and it makes it more believable. Goldberg is solid as her friend who wants to be there for her, but Beth isn’t ready. The same can be said for Vondie Curtis-Hall who is taking on the character of Mel, a family friend. Jonigkiet is interesting as Owen. He is dead at the beginning, but we see things play out with him. He has an intense look. Aside from that, I thought the rest of the cast rounded this out for what was needed.
Next, I’ll go to the cinematography, effects and the soundtrack. For the former, they do some good things with the atmosphere. The framing works for things and part of the effects come into play there as well. We are getting dream sequences or hallucinates that made for some creepy imaginary we see. I think both of these aspects work together and are effective. The atmosphere is also built by the soundtrack and sound design. There is a jump-scare in this movie that got me. It made my chest hurt actually. This made me think back to the last time one worked this well and it happened with After Midnight when I saw that in the theater. They are much different in what they did, but still were effective.
So then in conclusion here, I enjoyed this movie quite a bit. We have an interesting story here of dealing with a realistic tragedy. It is then being taken into a potential supernatural way of looking at things. I like the commentary here regardless of how you read the movie. The acting from Hall is great and the rest of the cast helps direct her to where she ends up. The atmosphere is solid with how things are framed, the effects used and the soundtrack to build on that. This has been one of the better movies from this year. I’d rate this as a good movie that is bordering on being great.
My Rating: 8.5 out of 10
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2021
15
director: David Bruckner
starring: Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Vondie Curtis Hall, Evan JonigKeit, Stacy Martin etc
A widow begins to uncover her recently deceased husband’s disturbing secrets. The night house was very good and a pleasant surprise.
My first few positives would be the cinematography, character background and connecting with the main character. As well as the tense tone and building of tension and the Jumpscares. The film was visually fantastic. The setting of the house was perfect for this movie and provided an excellent tone and visual appeal. But the use of fog and the fascinating use of red was a fantastic and creative element to the film that was amazing to look at. I also thought the character background was great. The film went into a great amount of detail into the main characters past and her relationship with her husband, she seemed genuinely happy and because of this attention to detail it made it so much easier to connect with her as a character. The film did such an excellent job at focusing on its main character and making you sympathise with her situation and understand what she was going through. It was well written and hit good emotional beats. The film did such a good job at building its tension throughout and delivering a very tense tone. Playing on the fear of the unknown excellently, and the scenes slowly got more and more intense and frightening increasing the fear and tension for the main character. The tone and atmosphere were the main focus and I loved that. The Jump scares were also excellent but never overused. They were very sudden and excellently timed to really startle you. This wasn’t the main focus which I loved, and they were unpredictable.
I only had a few negatives for the film. The pacing in the first act was fairly bland with a lack of set up. Some overly awkward dialogue. And the tension and high concept was inconsistent. The film did take a while to get going. With some very slow pacing in the beginning without any form of horror introduced for a little while, also with a lack of set up, with a series of normal day to day scenes and just photos of her ex without any full explanation or development into the next act of the film. Some of the dialogue was overly awkward as well. I think it was for the most part intentional showing how people react with alcohol to a death. But some of the dialogue that the characters were saying was very blunt and awkward to watch and was slightly too awkward and for me didn’t come across too well. Finally, I felt like the films high concept and tension was slightly inconsistent throughout. The tension that the film built strongly did stop and start on a fair number of occasions making the pacing clunky in places. And the high concept of the film didn’t really kick in fully until the third act making parts of the second and first act seem more simplistic then perhaps was intended.
My final positives would be the excellent sound design and performances. The deep themes portrayed. The interesting concept and strong supporting cast. As well as an inventive final act with some strong twists. The sound design was used very effectively here. With the creaking of footsteps or certain situations repeated with the same sound really created a more intense and mysterious atmosphere. The performance from Rebecca Hall was also very strong. Her performance was moving, powerful and authentic and I think she deserves a lot of work from this. The high concept of the film was fascinating. Having a house that looks exactly the same to the house the main character was living in and having woman that looker exactly like her was a great concept for a horror and was executed really well. The film also handled some deep themes cleverly. The themes of grief and how people cope with it as well as people’s perceptions and ideas on death and life after death were told through imagery and dialogue and it was a unique and excellent element to the film. The Night house also had a very strong supporting cast. Sarah Goldberg and Vondie Curtis Hall were brilliant here. Their performances were strong, their characters likeable and they had a purpose to the plot. The twist in the final act was very creative and unexpected. Having the man Beth was seeing not actually be her husband but a visual representation of nothing which was what was viewed as life after death was a deep and fascinating twist that led to a very inventive final act. The visual style and creativity as well as the powerful imagery and intensity of the final act really stuck with me and was unique and powerfully done.
Overall, despite not executing its deep concept to its full potential. The Night house is an intense and fascinating horror. That manages to connect intellectually and emotionally. Whilst also delivering tension and atmosphere that was excellently executed. With a fantastic lead performance from Rebecca Hall.
Overall rating 81/100
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