The Night House (David Bruckner, 2021)

[DarkImbecile]

I was happily surprised by David Bruckner's The Night House, a Sundance debut that ably balances creepy and melancholy while adding a couple of genuinely jump-worthy scares* to the emotionally fraught story of Rebecca Hall's search for the reasons behind her husband's unexpected suicide and the nature of the house he built for them. I'm already a big fan of Hall's, and her performance here did nothing to dissuade me from that opinion; she more than sells the psychological stress of her situation even before any supernatural elements begin to worm their way into the plot.

The film feels somewhat indebted to Mike Flanagan's recent features and the two Haunting series, but with a little more rawness and less rigorous control over performances and the camera, in ways that mostly worked for me; definitely recommended to fans of that type of emotion-forward horror. Not every swing it takes totally connects, but enough do that it feels satisfying both in delivering the shocks the genre demands while also offering a relatively mature examination of the tolls of depression, suicide, and secrets.

This is the only thing I've seen by Bruckner outside of one of the least-successful segments of the original V/H/S horror anthology, but he's apparently been given the reins of the new Hellraiser; can anyone vouch for his Netflix feature The Ritual from a few years ago?

*Caught this by myself in its last screening at one of my local theaters, and there's a moment about halfway in that lulled me into a false sense of complacency and then made me jump halfway out of my chair, which would have been embarrassing had there been anyone else nearby.

[brundlefly]

This is the only thing I've seen by Bruckner outside of one of the least-successful segments of the original V/H/S horror anthology, but he's apparently been given the reins of the new Hellraiser; can anyone vouch for his Netflix feature The Ritual from a few years ago?

Went back and forth on it. Sometimes it seemed special and enticingly underexplained, sometimes it just seemed to be parsing out too few ideas. Nifty monster, though, and it was decent enough that I am looking forward to The Night House.

[Persona]

I agree. The Ritual has some incredibly effective moments and the monster is indelible, but somehow it doesn't quite add up. I think maybe because it is very much character-centered horror and the character work isn't quite strong enough to elevate the film on that level.

So it leaves me about 50% excited to see The Night House, ha.

[Mr Sausage]

Her performance in The Night House was a flinty, abrasive marvel.

Thanks for pointing this movie out. I just watched it, and while it was terrific (and stressful!) as a horror movie, just on the back of Hall's performance I would've happily watched a low-key, uneventful drama about this woman's day-to-day managing of her grief.

[Matt]

That's just what I was saying to someone about it yesterday. I could have happily done without all the genre elements and just watched Hall's character alienating her friends and family with her grief.

[Robert Chipeska]

I like Hall, but I also liked Catherine Keener at this relative stage of her career. But like Keener, Hall seems to be increasingly stuck playing glum, difficult, thoroughly unlikeable characters, to the point where it's obviously typecasting. I'd like to see Hall escape that route, if possible. I have no need for likeable characters, per se, but the dour, bitchy, however-justifiably angry characters in these small-budget films generally pander to the that type of audience, with their own hang-ups and little psychodramas (all the girls in the audience say YEAH when she's snide at her husbands affair! Suh-nap!) and it's tiring. Mix it up a little, ladies, let's see some range. And frankly, someone like Lili Taylor often plays similar roles but with a greater degree of depth and vulnerability. Or maybe she's just a better judge of scripts?

As for the film, agreed that the genre gimmicks were distracting from a potentially solid relationship/grief story. Don't know why so many middling directors are incapable of writing or recognizing good scripts about this stuff. Bergman (I know, a high standard) could make a simple conversation more terrifying than all the optical gimmicks and faux-metaphysics in this film.

[therewillbeblus]

After all the relatively consistent soft hype, unfortunately I thought this was just okay. It's a respectful-enough portrait of a woman processing grief I guess, but I was disappointed by how afraid the filmmakers were to engage with that frenzied unpredictable state on its terms. The script in particular keeps Hall's response at an overstated Psych101 level of vividly aggressive reactions to loss, orbiting around a single note and holding it there. Sure, she varies considerably around that pole, but I wish she was allowed to follow a chaotically nonlinear trajectory of labile expressiveness to that psychological chaos, which would have been riskier but more appropriate for the film's own exploration. I agree with DI about Hall, and she does her best with the limited cues for behavioral dispositions she's given, but this had all the makings of a great film and sadly took a safer route- not to mention one distracted by the horror plot instead of using it to prompt Hall to move through these messy stages of grief. The film seems to only exist for this exercise to happen, so it's a mystery why it's not really given room to breathe. Maybe I'm just being too hard on the film from a professional standpoint, but I've seen enough movies tackle this feeling very well and expose themselves vulnerably to the disorder of the mental state before, to the point where I'm sorry but Hall moving from cold assertiveness and demanding answers to crying about not knowing 'why' just reads as lazy and superficial writing to me. The direction is technically strong and there's a lot this film is doing right on its polished surface levels, but it just felt irritatingly cautious around what I thought it was setting out to accomplish and thus frustratingly emptier than its allegorical narrative promised.

However, I did think the film made an interesting point accidentally -there's no way anyone involved was conscious of this reading- that made me really appreciate its third-act horror reveal:

SpoilerShow

Hall, like many who have lost someone (particularly to suicide), is looking for something tangible, some reason, and when she actually gets said reason, it's both incredibly fantastical in a cathartically narcissistic way (of course my husband spent his life tormented, willing to kill others and himself for me, the center of his universe) and also anti-cathartic and repelling in how banal and uninteresting it all is. So the idea of actually achieving this 'answer' and having it be unsatisfactory for both the more mature egocentric part of her, as well as the younger, immature part that needs stimulation and desires the feeling of catharsis, is a nice affirmation that we don't actually crave the honest tangible answer we would get, even if it's as batshit as this one.

[colinr0380]

This was an interesting film, although quite dour and about very depressing subject matter, as Beth who in the wake of her husband Owen inexplicably committing suicide takes both to the bottle and has a mental breakdown, imagining that she is seeing ghostly visions of her dead husband in the lake house that he built. In a rather ironic way that first low key half of the film proves to be the one in which the heroine, whilst she is seemingly at her most vulnerable and raw, eventually proves to be most in control of the direction of the narrative: that is the section where despite the grief being at its most raw and carrying a glass of booze around the house with her all the time, the main character is doing all of those tasks of trying to keep life going in the face of tragedy and is throwing herself into boxing up her husband's things and furious bouts of cathartic cleaning. This is the section where the monsters and jump scares are safely confined to your classic nightmare sequence. And is probably the section of the film being endorsed by Mr Sausage, Matt and Robert Chipeska in their posts above, which I would agree with the praise for (I particularly love the restaurant scene with the friends all trying to negotiate their way around discussing the recent loss, which may be the best scene in the whole film).

Then the second half starts 'explaining' things, and giving external reasons for the heroine to be distraught rather than internal, psychologically-based ones (the conflict between which is probably the main theme of the film). The heroine finds that her husband (spoilers):

SpoilerShow

initially seems to have been having an affair with another woman, which allows for a large chunk of the film to be about the wife tracking down the mistress and then eventually a big scene between the two suspiciously similar looking women where they hash things out with each other, and seemingly part on a kind of a level playing field where both get to bond over the shared betrayal of the man they were both seduced by. And then we get further revelations that Owen had apparently been serial killing lots of women who looked like Beth and stashing them all over the mirrored house on the opposite side of the lake, and that other woman had been lucky to have escaped with her life, although in that other woman escaping without being killed she perhaps proved to be the catalyst for the downfall of everyone in the situation. Because the twist upon that twist is that Owen had been killing all of those women to try and trick a malevolent spirit that was actually going after Beth by sacrificing lots of women who looked like Beth to it instead in a diversionary tactic, combined with building a replica house with lots of Winchester House-style twists and turns to confuse the supernatural entity and so protect Beth in the short term from it.

No wonder Bruckner went on to do the Hellraiser remake after this, as that revelation of Owen being a killer has him acting in a very similar way of seductively luring victims to their doom in order to 'save' someone else to Julia in Hellraiser, or Channard and Julia in Hellbound! Although I think the big flaw of the film is that it rather falls apart if you try to make sense of it too much, as all of the twists eventually build up a character into doing really silly acts with no notion of any exit strategy except for the gun, as eventually Owen has been shown to have murdered dozens of women in that mirrored house to keep the entity distracted for, like what, one to two weeks each time? Only to then commit suicide when the pretence was too much to keep going, all the while refusing to tell Beth, his wife, anything about the entity that had been stalking her ever since an almost fatal car crash in her younger days (like Death in Final Destination stalks its victims), which both lets her wallow in self-medicated self-hating depression for far too long and leaves her completely defenceless and clueless about what the heck is going on in the wake of his death, having to spend the majority of the film on irrelevant quests to track down adulterous lovers and finding out that her husband was a killer rather than the really more pressing issue of an invisible entity out to destroy her sanity and drag her into a literal void of Nothing-ness, which is all that exists in a God-less world.

And inevitably it all boils down to 'the Man' being the biggest dummy of all where Owen, in trying to protect Beth, thoughtlessly and cruelly hurt a lot of innocent people. The film in its second half tries to mitigate Beth's (much more interesting and grounded) mental fragility and alcoholism by providing concrete proof that Beth was right to be paranoid all along, but in a way in which Beth being proven to be correct in her suspicions and not just having a mental breakdown leads to much more upsetting 'real world' revelations of nefarious behaviour carried out by others. It is like Beth is in search of anything to be able to move on from the crippling grief at losing her husband, even if it comes at the cost of revealing that she was married to a liar, adulterer and murderer anyway, so good riddance and you can sleep sound now that you are not sad for the loss any more.

But then the twist upon that twist is that the invisible ghost hanging around her for most of the film is not that of Owen (going from being characterised as the attempts to contact from the spirit realm of a loved one not wanting to leave the mortal plain into being a vicious brutal abusive spouse wanting to continue his crimes as a poltergeist) but instead this much bigger stalking figure of "Nothing", which is kind of the existential nihilistic embodiment of futility and utter lack of any kind of redemption in the afterlife (which kind of makes Owen killing all of those innocent women even worse for pre-meditatedly knowing that he was throwing them into the black hole void of emptiness beyond this realm before their due time! I mean, sure, Beth seems very nice and all that but is she really worth killing over a dozen women for?). The best moments in this film come from those creepily effective cut-out silhouettes of the figure appearing in mouldings of the ways that doorframes and corridors line up, turning the film, after the extensive section focusing on 'real world' horror, back into the horrors of a figure who has set up residence within your own head. Which leads to that seductive-bullying goading to suicide on the boat final scene, which I thought was really well handled to suggest that yet again, and even with all of Owen's crimes, this is all about Beth's mental state and fortitude to keep fighting against the pull to nihilistic self destruction, which is not something that anyone can intercede on her behalf to prevent but which she, and only she, has to confront. With the nicely disturbing implication that she was barely able to reject the temptation this time around but that figure of Nothing-ness, now that it finally has her directly in its sights, will always be patiently waiting out there on that boat for her to arrive in due course, like the ferryman on the River Styx.
___

Phew! So it is a really heavy film, and whether intentional or not I ended up coming away with a big smorgasbord list of films that parts of it reminded me of, and along with Hellraiser this film is kind of mashing together ideas from:

White of the Eye - the theme of a wife who finds out that her husband is a local serial killer of women
The House That Jack Built - for the serial killer aspect, and the eventual embodiment of the siren call of the underworld that could just be the last imaginings of a dying mind. And, you know, for the whole hiding corpses in dry walls of your newbuild home aspect.
Rebecca - the second, 'forbidden' house down by the shore where one member of a couple was carrying out illicit assignations, and eventually murder
The Entity - that whole final sequence of Beth being terrorised in the bathroom, first being 'seduced' by Owen, then seeing Owen in the mirror smashing one of the female victim's head into it, and then Beth having the same thing occur on her side of the mirror by the invisible entity. With the implication that "Nothing" is both a poltergeist and the main character being just as much terrorised by the demons in her own head.
Mother! - the way that the house(s) in The Night House are eventually revealed to be gigantic allegorical architectural representations of a woman's trauma: although Mother! is about the tyranny of of Believers forcing you into being their blood sacrifice to their God; whilst The Night House is about the terror of there being no God and people are still fast-tracking themselves into oblivion
What Lies Beneath - this is a big one, because structurally What Lies Beneath and The Night House feel really similar, as a woman potters around her extraordinarily privileged and beautiful bespoke home for the majority of the film, does some investigating into stuff that turns out to be a complete red herring to uncovering the actual mystery, only to find out that wanting to know whatever the cost means that the cost is knowing that her husband is the monster hidden in plain sight all along
Night of the Eagle - and this is the other big one that got brought to mind during the Owen trying to protect Beth subplot, as this is another film about not appreciating what your spouse does for you until they are out of the picture, in which a successful college professor finds out that his wife is a Witch and casting spells to make him a big success. He gets miffed about her doing this because he wants to succeed on his own merits not through manipulative shenanigans, and forces her to stop doing it. Only to find out after a run of unfortunate events that she was the only thing pushing back against all of the other much more malevolent witch and warlock members of staff who themselves were all conspiring against him!

EDIT: I would also add that seeing this film is only adding fuel to my thesis in progress that Stacy Martin may be one of the best supporting actresses currently working. She is always a welcome presence and plays the most interesting and memorable characters even (or especially!) in films that I may have some reservations about when looked at on the wider scale (i.e. High-Rise, Amanda and in this film)! That intense meet up scene with Beth in which she plays the eerie doppleganger usurper-potential adulterer-potential next victim of a serial killer and they have a kitchen table heart-to-heart in which she describes how her relationship with the main character’s husband began, and how she would have gone all the way until ‘for some reason’ Owen had second thoughts and bundled her quickly out of the house is the other best scene in the film and, at least to me, makes that whole mid-section red-herring adultery plot strand worthwhile.