Review: The Night House

Image courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Drenched in atmosphere and bolstered by a strong performance by Rebecca Hall, David Bruckner's "The Night House" is a genuinely creepy horror movie with an intriguing mystery at its center that maybe tries to bite off a little more than it can chew, but I'm not one to fault a genre movie for trying to be about something other than just jump scares and scary imagery.

The film is basically about the grieving process - in this case, Beth (Hall) is at a loss to explain why her seemingly happy husband, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit), took a boat out one night on the lake next to their secluded upstate New York home and committed suicide by gun. His presence seems to haunt their home in the days afterward, and Beth always seems like a person on the verge of a breakdown, most notably while out for drinks with friends or dealing with a parent trying to argue for a higher grade for their child (Beth is a teacher, by the way).

At first, Beth assumes the strange noises she hears in her home at night or the quick glimpses of images that must be imaginary are all part of her process of grieving - that is, until she finds some strange books kept hidden by her husband as well as photos on his cell phone of women who look almost exactly like Beth, but aren't her. Even more bizarre is when she finds another secluded home that appears to resemble her own hidden away in the woods near her property.

Her friends rightfully seem concerned and warn Beth not to go digging into Owen's past - she might find something she doesn't like and, after all, isn't it better to remember him as her loving husband? A neighbor (Vondie Curtis Hall, solid in a supporting performance) also worries about Beth, and one day reveals to her an odd meeting he had with Owen while walking in the woods.

Meanwhile, strange shadows loom in Beth's home, she manages to track down one of the women photographed on Owen's cell phone and is regaled with a strange and unsettling story and the record player in her living room starts up at all hours - mostly playing Richard and Linda Thompson's ghostly "The Calvary Cross" - of the night. What exactly is going on?

Once we finally figure out what it all means, audience members might vary on whether "The Night House" sticks the landing. When the film goes from the figurative to the literal, the explanation could be seen as a little flimsy, although in metaphorical terms it leaves a lot to chew on. In many ways, Beth is battling her grief, but also her longtime obsession with death - an accident, she tells a friend at one point in the movie, left her dead for several minutes when she was younger - is a factor here.

Regardless of whether the film ties everything up neatly or if the conclusion brings all of the film's ideas together into a cohesive whole really doesn't matter that much. "The Night House" is a brooding, eerie and effective haunted house movie with an excellent performance by Hall - and much of the supporting cast. 

Its insistence on dwelling on concepts that are more thoughtful than one might expect from an American horror movie would likely cause some to classify it as "elevated horror" - a slightly pejorative term to describe thinking-person's genre exercises. That might be an adequate classification, but in some ways "The Night House" feels less like a horror movie that tackles weighty subject matter, and more like a thoughtful film on distressing subjects that uses horror tropes to tell its story. However you might classify it, it's effective.