A woman is tormented by a supernatural presence – or perhaps figments of her own imagination – after the sudden death of her husband by suicide in The Night House, a genuinely frightening new chiller from director David Bruckner (The Ritual) that premiered at Sundance in early 2020 and now seeps into cinemas worldwide.
Despite the familiar premise and structure, The Night House manages to envelope you in its darkness and deliver some real scares. Only an unsatisfying ending keeps this from rating among the year’s best horror movies.
In The Night House, Rebecca Hall stars as Beth, left alone in an isolated house by the lake after husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) rowed himself out one day and put a gun to his head. Friend and teaching colleague Claire (Sarah Goldberg) helps her home after the funeral; lone neighbor Max (Vondie Curtis-Hall) stops by to make sure she’s holding up.
But The Night House belongs to Hall: she’s alone on the screen through much of the film, exploring the dark nooks and crannies of her isolated home as she tries to find some meaning behind her husband’s shocking death. It’s a credit to Hall’s intense performance that the character is able to maintain our empathy through her descent into the darkness, and a credit to the filmmakers that the movie maintains our rapt interest despite a minimum of story.
That story is clear from the outset, though the details are slowly sketched out the further Beth digs into her husband’s past — and suffers through a waking nightmare that parallels themes of survivor’s guilt and coming to terms with the suicide of a loved one.
In The Night House, those themes are brought to vivid life through actual nightmares, alcohol-induced hallucinations, some inventive optical illusions, and even real-deal creepy stuff Beth turns up while investigating her husband’s secret life.
But what separates The Night House from the usual ghost story is that despite Beth’s fear of the unknown, there’s also an innate attraction: she’s not ready to say goodbye to her husband, and the ghostly spectre that is tormenting her also represents the love of her life. There’s a wonderfully intense sequence here featuring an unseen presence moving closer and closer to Beth on a dock; we expect a jump scare, but she instead lovingly falls into its embrace.
But despite that unusual sequence, the film remains creepy throughout and undeniably delivers the chills. The Night House features one of the most effective jump scares in recent memory, a sequence that slowly and meticulously lulls you into a false sense of security so deep that the scare is genuinely surprising, and utterly terrifying; it may rank alongside a similar scene in The Exorcist III as one of the best examples of a “boo!” moment in cinema.
Despite a great feel for the scary stuff, however, director Bruckner ultimately loses grasp of the story. Some unusual and illogical choices during the third act of The Night House threaten to knock over the carefully constructed house of cards that has been so carefully built during the previous two; far too much is literalized, and the movie becomes less scary the more it explains itself.
Still, The Night House is a perfect haunt for mainstream horror fans seeking something a little more abstract. In the darkened halls of a deserted multiplex in 2021, this one is a scary good time.