There is a subset of horror in which The house of the night, at least at first glance, fits squarely and cleanly: slow-moving stories of attractive well-to-do people confronting appalling and strange forces in properties so chic-ly designed and sumptuously appointed – preferably with a lapping natural body of water nearby – it almost makes the psychological torment worth enduring.
This “almost” deserves particular attention in the case of David Bruckner’s elegant perhaps ghost story, whose protagonist enters the proceedings in worse condition than most, although it will take us some time to find out. exactly why. We first meet young high school teacher Beth (Rebecca Hall) shrouded in a hazy cloud of sympathy from others, the kind where people give pans instead of knowing what to say. She barely speaks for the first quarter hour of the film, though Hall’s impressive and expressive arsenal of deeply hurt looks and feverish tics give us a sense of what’s going on. It’s not until an impromptu parent-teacher meeting, when Beth goes after an overbearing and unsuspecting helicopter mother, that the truth emerges. After 14 years of marriage, without any prior warning, Beth’s architect husband, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit), recently blew his brains out as he cruised by their serenely modernist half-timbered home in northern India. New York State.
This house, however. Perfectly appointed for the needs of the film by production designer Kathrin Eder, he is Architectural Summary tour equipment. But that’s not why Beth, her impulses otherwise torn this way and that by grief and confusion, can’t leave her beautiful death sheet. Not the only one, anyway. The house was designed and built from scratch by Adam himself, with every dimension and detail reflecting his presence and personality: staying in the space he has made for her, it seems, is the closest thing to sharing space with him. And that’s before Beth starts to feel her mind lingering there in a less abstract way. Muffled snatches of his voice ripple through the rooms like a winter breeze. Human-shaped shadows emerge from the walls and melt away again in a split second. The stereo develops a strange habit of playing its favorite brand of heavy alternative rock in the middle of the night. Beth is disturbed by these developments – of course she is. But is the cold they leave worse than that left by his absence?
So screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski lay the groundwork for a well-constructed, conventionally constructed haunted house chiller. But Bruckner (a V/H/S anthology alum who also gave us 2017’s tight little wilderness horror The ritual) and Hall herself sometimes deviate from the plan, forming something a little more eerie and sculptural. Beth’s investigation of paranormal activity in her home follows certain expected rhythms: occult clues are uncovered, Owen’s previously unseen demons are released, parallel spaces and double lives are scintillatingly teased. But for much of its runtime, The night house never seems too preoccupied with solving the problem, though a streak of real-world terror begins to line up with his supernatural whispers.
It’s Beth who is the most compelling mystery, as the film attempts to psychologically map her tangled emotions of grief, guilt, anger, and uncanny elation onto her increasingly fractured sense of reality. Maybe she’s more haunted by Owen than by the house; maybe she prefers it, because it’s better to be alone. Hall is the actor you want for this mission. As in her different feverish performance as convicted journalist Christine Chubbuck in Christina, the British star (who between that and directing the extraordinary drama to come Who passed has a good year) has a default setting of lively and solid credibility that makes fear and disbelief all the more intrusive and alarming.
But even though the naturally stoic and skeptical Beth spins around in circles, she never seems off balance. We loyally adhere to his point of view, even as his reality seems to slip from its center. It helps that she also has that rarest asset in the horror genre: a best friend, accurately played by Sarah Goldberg, who actually seems like a real, empathetic person with a life outside of her scenes – a another believable graphic point for Beth’s growing disarray. (Vondie Curtis-Hall, as Beth’s caring, semi-secret neighbor, is unfortunately more of a common presence.)
The night house isn’t the first high-class horror film to play the “grief is the real bogeyman, actually” card. There’s room for that on the same shelf as Ari Aster Hereditary and that of Jennifer Kent The Babadook, even if Bruckner plays a little more at the gallery than these filmmakers. He knows his way around a Grade A jump scare, rearranging the skeleton, though rarely of the empty, anticlimactic variety. Nightmares overflow other nightmares, and disturbing strange new forces roam the house even when they are not the ones Beth fears. The nerves are only shredded, with no time for repair.
For a tantalizing stretch, it looks like the movie has even more modernist designs in mind, as it strays completely from horror to the more zen, unresolved hauntings of something like Olivier Assayas’ exquisiteness. personal customer (2016). It’s more touching when Beth is just trying to feel Owen, physically to feel him, through the mystical fog, his own skin shifting and quivering strangely in the attempt – not ghost hunting but ghost bonding. The script is a bit too literal to sustain that, however, with the filmmakers working towards a middle ground between real and unreal, living and dead, that makes sense and eases our emotions in the process. This is a film that is more concerned with explanation than evocation. (The house, at least, still has our hearts.) Bruckner, Collins and Piotrowski are collaborating on a remake of hellraiser next; given this extremely elegant proof, they will do a smart job of it. But greatness awaits them if they give in to ghosts.
