At about the third scene set after dark in The Night House, I found I was genuinely dreading whenever nighttime came in this movie. Though I’ve seen similar haunted house stories, something particular about the way director David Bruckner shoots and paces his sequences and Rebecca Hall’s astoundingly tense performance gives these interludes a real urgent horror that not every film of this kind can pull off. I think it has to do with emptiness, the isolation too in conjunction with the slipping mindfulness of Hall’s character Beth, a teacher who has just lost her husband to suicide and is discovering disturbing new secrets about him post mortem as she seems to be haunted by his spirit in the house they’ve built by the lake.
The Night House certainly teases its’ audience with the psychological state of its’ protagonist, struggling to process the trauma and grief of the situation in addition to the horrifying revelations she is coming across, all the more terrifying being the ones with seemingly no explanation. The bizarre obsession with the occult and a particularly gruesome totem, a fixation on women who bear a strong resemblance to her. We see the effects of the trauma manifest the deeper she gets, her rational acuity consistently dipping, her behaviour becoming more erratic, and at every turn her friends discourage her in her investigations for the sake of her mental health. But this mystery just keeps plaguing her, as do her frightening episodes and visions. Often times, it reminds me of Adam Wingard’s Invisible Man, but this film strikes a more curious balance between the tangible and the supernatural, especially as it goes on. Both depict a similar kind of imperceptible apparition torturing an emotionally fraught woman, and both link that being with the figure of her deceased husband -but the visceral nature of this subject in The Invisible Man was never in doubt, it was clearly a real person of some kind executing this harassment. The Night House though continually casts doubt on any certainty of what Beth is experiencing.
Doubtless her engagements with the supernatural force that seems to be haunting her house are real only to her. Multiple times they end on her awakening as though from a dream -but this too is a bit distorted. Bruckner uses a lot of intriguing choices to blur those lines, such as having Beth run into the house to find herself sleeping on the sofa only for her to come to a moment later on that sofa seeing nobody at the door. She experiences visions that are dramatic and terrifying, and honestly Bruckner does pretty well with both his mood and his jump scares within them -emphasizing music and sound and the removal of elements over more banal approaches in terms of the latter, and a frightful kind of framing and situational solitude concerning the former. The most striking visual choice that is made in these sequences is an inventive one whereby Bruckner and his VFX team use the environment and negative space to form a shape, generally a silhouette only perceptible in its’ movement. It’s a great trick that Bruckner is quite proud of to the point of repeating it a few times to perhaps a lack of effectiveness, but it is genuinely creepy in a way I hadn’t anticipated.
So much of these hallucinatory episodes though work primarily because they are centred on the emotions, anxieties, and vulnerable psyche of a troubled lead character conveyed to us by an utterly impeccable Rebecca Hall. It’s an enrapturing performance full of heavy and complex emotions pertaining to dealing with grief and the fear of death. Beth isn’t processing her trauma healthily as she attempts to detach herself subjectively from it. One incredible scene early on that first showcases Hall’s total grasp of this state while providing the audience necessary information, is when a parent comes to see Beth about her kids’ failing grade only to be awkwardly confronted by her blunt account of her husbands’ death and her ambivalent intolerance towards any business of grades or helicopter parent entitlement. Elsewhere she’s seen making light of the incident or conjuring big assumptions, failing to hide her fractured mental state. All the while we feel the frustrations and concern of her best friend Claire, played by a sensitive Sarah Goldberg, terrified of the prospect of Beth going too far down this rabbit hole.
She can’t stop her though as Beth’s journey through uncovering dark secrets in both her reality and the spectral one leads her to a harrowing conclusion not at all what she was anticipating. The last act of this movie is its’ most visually, atmospherically compelling, but also where the narrative takes some truly wild turns that are likely to strain credulity for a lot of audiences –even for a movie already about a haunting. The apparition suddenly takes on a whole new conceptual meaning and context, everything Beth has been learning about her husband and his actions is cast in a different light. That side of it is problematic and ill-thought through, diminishing his agency and responsibility over very real atrocities; but the ideas in this final twist apart from it I find are quite consistent with what Beth has been going through. The truth of what actually is tormenting her is a degree more extreme than the suppositions preceding it, but no less eerie –in fact it’s existentially more so. And the expressionistic directing and acting here (including some interesting mime-work on Hall’s part) is marvellous.
The film contains a lot of clear metaphor too so that it doesn’t have to be read with total literalness –even in the end its’ unclear how much of the horror is attached purely to Beth’s psyche. On this personal, ambiguously metaphysical level, The Night House most firmly succeeds. It does its’ job effectively as a chilling horror film too, with some unique flourishes, a thorough grasp of creeping mood and tension, and it gives Hall, an oft-overlooked actress, an essential chance to really demonstrate the weight of her talents. A horror movie not to be underestimated.
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