Here’s a refreshing film… an actually scary, mysterious, and thrilling horror movie. It shouldn’t be hard… but apparently it is. And it’s in a sub-genre of horror that contains some of the most trite examples of horror movies, some of the biggest clichés and it’s still a smart, original spook show.
The Night House stars Rebecca Hall as a woman who has just lost her husband. And soon – and rather quickly – she decides that he’s haunting their lake house. And soon she begins to unravel some disturbing secrets. Who was her husband and why did he die?
Yeah, it’s a haunted house movie… a genre so easy to do wrong, it’s simply remarkable when someone gets it right. This is a very unsettling movie that oozes a creeping skin factor greater than a dozen bad examples combined. It’s a bit of a slow burn and yet contains a number of jump scares – loud ones – which feel earned. It also contains a number of “it was just a dream” sequences that somehow don’t feel like cliched time-fillers. That’s quite the trick to pull off!
Rebecca Hall puts in an amazing performance. She’s certainly helped by being handed a nuanced, interesting, smart character. Her performance is raw, powerful, direct, and the appropriate amount of curious and stony given the circumstances. I really enjoyed her character – a generally good person who is operating on a knife’s edge so can sometimes slip into anger or a more subtle passive aggressive bluntness. This is Hall’s movie and she carries it like a superstar.
I’d say that the movie doesn’t manage to maintain the suspense for the entire length. It couldn’t maintain the feeling of oozing mystery and dread and I started to adjust to it and settle in. It’s unfortunate since it was otherwise working great. Yet I simply cannot argue that, in the final moments, I wasn’t actively concerned for Hall’s character’s life. So rarely am I unsure – and able to give a damn – about a character’s well-being.
So this is a really special, really powerful suspense horror/thriller. It is in an existing tired genre but it’s mature and intelligent about it. Don’t avoid it thinking it’s just cheap scares and gore (there’s none of that). It’s worth taking a chance.
Score: 87