As in her differently fevered performance as doomed news reporter Christine Chubbuck in Christine, the British star (who, between this and directing the extraordinary, upcoming drama Passing is having quite a year) has a default setting of keen, sturdy credibility that makes fear and self-disbelief all the more intrusive and alarming.īut even as the naturally stoic, skeptical Beth spirals, she never seems unhinged. Hall is the actor you want for this assignment. Maybe she’s more haunted by Owen than the house maybe she prefers it that way, because it beats being alone. It’s Beth who’s the more compelling mystery, as the film attempts to psychologically map her tangled emotions of sorrow, guilt, anger and odd exhilaration onto her increasingly fractured sense of reality. But for much of its running time, The Night House never seems overly preoccupied with solving the problem, even as a trail of real-world terror starts to line up with its supernatural whisperings. Beth’s investigation of her home’s paranormal activity follows certain expected beats: occult clues are uncovered, Owen’s previously invisible demons are hauled out, parallel spaces and double lives are glimmeringly teased. But Bruckner (a V/H/S anthology alumnus who also gave us 2017’s tight little wilderness horror The Ritual) and Hall herself occasionally deviate from the plan, forming something a little more strange and sculptural. Thus do screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski lay the foundations for a conventionally well-built haunted-house chiller. But is the chill they leave worse than the one left by his absence? Beth is disturbed by these developments - of course she is. The stereo develops a strange habit of playing his favored brand of lumbery alt-rock in the middle of the night. Human-shaped shadows emerge from the walls and melt away again in a split second.
Muffled wisps of his voice ripple through rooms like a winter draft. And that’s before Beth begins to sense that his spirit is lingering there in a less abstract fashion. The house was designed and built from the ground up by Adam himself, its every dimension and detail a reflection of his presence and personality: remaining in the space he made for her, it seems, is the closest thing to sharing space with him. But that’s not the reason why Beth, her impulses otherwise torn this way and that by grief and confusion, can’t leave its beautiful, deathly pall. Perfectly appointed for the film’s purposes by production designer Kathrin Eder, it’s Architectural Digest tour material. Meet the Beatle: A Guide to Ringo Starr's Solo Career in 20 Songs
After 14 years of marriage, with no previous warning of anything amiss, Beth’s architect husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) recently blew his brains out while boating near their serenely modernist, timber-framed lake house in upstate New York. Only in an impromptu parent-teacher meeting, when Beth snaps at an overbearing, unsuspecting helicopter mom, does the truth emerge. She barely speaks for the film’s first quarter-hour, though Hall’s impressive-expressive arsenal of plungingly wounded stares and febrile tics gives us some sense of what’s up. We first encounter young high school teacher Beth (Rebecca Hall) enveloped in a hazy cloud of others’ sympathy, the kind where people donate casseroles in lieu of knowing what to say. That “almost” deserves particular emphasis in the case of David Bruckner’s elegant, skin-prickling maybe-ghost story, whose protagonist enters the proceedings in worse shape than most, though it takes us some time to find out exactly why. There’s a subset of horror into which The Night House, at least at first glance, squarely and tidily fits: slow-creep tales of attractively well-off people facing appalling, uncanny forces in properties so chic-ly designed and plushly appointed - preferably with some natural body of water lapping nearby - it almost makes the psychological torment worth enduring.
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