The Night House Review (Film, 2021)
content warning: death by suicide, violence against women, mental wellness, blood, alcohol abuse, nudity
The Night House is a challenging film to address. I’m personally going to call it an experimental horror film at this point. There is a plot that carries through the entire film, but I don’t believe that it’s anywhere near the most important element of the story.
This is a film about depression, grieving, and trauma. When the film begins, Beth’s husband Owen is dead. She’s so determined to suppress her emotions that she walks back into her classroom on the last in-service day of the school year to finish her grading. It takes about 10-15 minutes of screentime for Beth to actually admit to an overly aggressive parent that her husband died by suicide and she found the body. The cork’s off the bottle at that point, literally, as Beth spends her free time drinking, cleaning, and uncovering secrets she never knew about her husband while he was alive. That’s all before she starts to believe that her house is being haunted by Owen.
There is a lot to unpack in The Night House. While the death by suicide is not shown, it is largely the substance of the film. Beth is haunted by the gun she didn’t even know her husband owned. She keeps feeling compelled to go down to the dock and climb into the boat where Owen died. When the hauntings begin, she hears a loud noise—quite literally a gunshot the first time—before the presence makes itself known. Everything Beth sees reminds her of Owen, and every time she thinks about Owen, she thinks about his death.
This alone is enough content for a horror film. Director David Bruckner (The Ritual) handles the material well. It does not feel exploitative or manipulative. It’s handled with a whole lot more nuance and self-control than similar contemporary horror films. I felt safe interacting with this story, which is not always the case when death by suicide is front and center in a narrative.
The Night House goes deeper than this. The film explores theories of the afterlife, Non-Euclidean geometry, rituals and mental wellness, the occult, architecture, and grief. All of it connects in unexpected ways, but the constant shifting focus makes this a challenging film to watch. It is dense. If it was a horror novel, it would have parenthetical asides, an appendix, footnotes, and QR codes to scan to connect all the dots.
I’ll be honest: I still don’t understand everything that happened in the story itself. That’s not a bad thing, either, if the film is explored as an experimental text.
I believe that David Bruckner took Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski’s screenplay and decided to make a film about masking and mental wellness. Beth discusses her own history of “bad thoughts” at a teacher get-together, insisting that Owen is the one who kept her sane. His death by suicide has her questioning everything she ever knew about his own mental health. The more she digs into his life, the more she realizes that he was also struggling in silence.
Owen’s rituals remind me of my own experience with OCD, in that he quietly would sneak away to do things that make absolutely no sense to anyone else because the thoughts in his head convinced him that was the only way to keep Beth safe. My rituals make me tap out patterns or follow certain paths in my house so I don’t get murdered by a stranger or sent to jail for crimes I didn’t commit; Owen’s rituals have him build architecture with hidden messages to ward off danger no one else can see or understand.
Beth thinks their relationship was happy and healthy. The only thing they disagreed on was death. Owen believes that there has to be something greater; Beth believes there is nothing. The note Owen left behind suggests that something finally changed his mind and pushed him to give up all hope. Meanwhile, that note is what pushes Beth to explore Owen’s work, see what secrets he kept from her, and run with the chance that he is haunting her dreams.
This tension is the driving force of the film. In life and in death, Beth and Owen never really understand each other. They had a beautiful, loving relationship on the surface that could have been deeply traumatic in the long term for their self-worth. Beth’s investigations only leave her more frustrated as she uncovers more and more signs of trouble she missed while Owen was still alive.
I have one major issue with the film that I think actively fights against its story and meaning. The transition to this haunted dream realm (hence the “night” in The Night House) is always signified by a loud noise. It’s a basic jump scare tactic that distracts from what’s actually happening. The gunshot was so loud, for example, that I thought someone kicked my chair in the theater; I was sitting in the last row. Then it happened every time with varying audio cues when it switched to the haunting scenes. Bruckner is a better filmmaker than this cheap trick.
There are two big reasons to see The Night House: Rebecca Hall’s performance and the climax.
Rebecca Hall gives one of the greatest leading performances I’ve ever seen in a horror film. She’s no stranger to leading solo scenes in a haunted house film. What was good about her performance in The Awakening is masterful here. Beth is an incredibly deep character with so many levels to explore and Hall constantly finds ways to surprise you. She can be the perfect grieving widow in one moment and then snap into a menacing figure a weapon away from being a serial killer. Her scene partner for over half of the film is the possibility of Owen’s ghost being in the house and she makes you believe every moment.
The climax is one of the scariest I’ve seen in recent memory. The special effects look real. I was inches away from jumping up and cheering in my seat for something I’ve never seen done that effectively before. Picture every possible haunted house and possession film scare mashed up into one action sequence; now center it on one character and take out any other actors from those scenes except for fleeting glances in the background. It’s mind-blowing. Believe me when I say I would have thrown down the money to watch the whole film a second time if a flood warning hadn’t come through on my phone.
If you’ve been here long enough, you know I rarely go into the distinction of good or bad. My approach is to analyze a piece of media through my lens and knowledge and let you decide if it seems like something you would want to experience.
Good or bad isn’t a fair metric for The Night House. This film is juggling flaming clubs while dancing ballet on a tight rope when the prompt was to play a game of chess. The tone, theme, and imagery are the substance, held together by a plot that exists to make you feel as frustrated and confused as Beth. She’s struggling with grief and untreated depression in the wake of tragedy and everything from set design to scoring exists to connect you with those struggles. Every answer you get only leads to more questions, and every question is so hard to reckon with that you might not even want the answer by the end.
The Night House is playing in theaters.
