Mark Reviews Movies: HOUSE OF DARKNESS (2022)

House of Darkness, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 8, 2022

It's not particularly difficult to determine the direction in which writer/director Neil LaBute's House of Darkness is heading. The setting is a manor as remote as it is grand and as grand as it is dark, ominous, and filled with foreboding shadows. The characters include a mysterious woman, as well as her equally mysterious sister, and a guy who has been lured to this isolated place with, not so much the promise, but definitely the hope of sex. If the guy could take the hint that he's obviously in a horror story and not the erotic fantasy he imagines himself to be in, the movie would be finished in about five minutes, tops.

Hap (Justin Long) doesn't realize that fact, though, because he has had a couple drinks at the local bar, somehow had some success using his awkward pick-up lines on this mysterious woman, and now finds himself being invited into the woman's estate home—a "castle," as he half jokes because he's basically telling the whole truth of the place with that description. Does Mina (Kate Bosworth) actually invite him into the mansion, though, or is he the one who does the inviting for her, while she offhandedly consents to his request?

LaBute's movie may be a horror story, as the setting and the occasional glimpse of someone or some silhouette in a corner and an opening shot of a dank cavern certainly suggest, but he, obviously, is a filmmaker who rarely concerns himself with such simple and straightforward matters of genre (His most famous foray into genre filmmaking—another horror movie, by the way—was infamous enough as a disaster to get him back, after some time, to making smaller, independent features such as this one). The horror elements here are more teases than parts of the narrative—save for a brief sequence that doesn't add up to much and until, obviously, the finale, when all of that hinting and winking stop as the screaming and the ripping begin.

This is more a chamber drama or, since it has to do with sex and how one character wants it enough to put himself in a situation we can tell is clearly perilous, comedy. It is kind of funny, because LaBute uses the template of a horror tale to emphasize and examine the power dynamics between Hap and Mina—and, later, Hap and another character.

At one point, Mina goes on for a bit about how, in this situation, Hap has all of the power. He could do anything he wanted to her, and in this location and at this time of the night and without another soul to be found in hearing distance, he could probably get away with it, too. That statement is a test, of course, to see how Hap will respond—even in the briefest of reflexes—to such a thought, and the joke is that we suspect—to the point of it being a certainty—that Mina isn't in any danger. That not because of the kind of man Hap is. It's more about who she is.

Most of the story amounts to a series of conversations between Hap and a woman—Mina at first and then her sister Lucy (Gia Crovatin), who is in the house and may have been here, listening to the two of them, the entire time. Early on, Hap flirts with Mina in that awkward way of trying not to seem as if he's flirting, while also attempting to make it clear that he more or less expects something to happen now that he has driven Mina home, come into the house, and is taking the time to talk to her.

Long is quite good at making a show of that game, as well as at showing how Mina's constant servings of alcohol gradually remove the filter of coming across as innocent in his intentions. Bosworth is clearly having fun, too, as the game-playing Mina, a woman who knows her charms and allure and, specifically, how being alternately upfront and enigmatic appeals to a man like Hap. He's in this for a specific kind of game—to look like "a good guy" and still get what he wants from Mina. She sees through it. That much is clear, and LaBute's own game is in gradually revealing just how much she can see through this most transparent example of male horniness.

Just as the payoff is predictable from the start (A couple of character names give away the specifics of the final details to anyone with a passing knowledge of a famous, century-old horror novel), the whole of the joke is pretty routine. In regards to most of it, LaBute gets a pass for sure on account of the strength of his dialogue, which has Hap and Mina getting into the nitty-gritty of how each of them can use language to be just honest enough not to be overtly lying.

Additionally, there are the performances, which appropriately play the material both straight, as an examination of sexual dynamics, and with the wink of playing toward the punch line (In addition to Long and Bosworth, Crovatin has a great quality of understated deadpan). House of Darkness, though, is ultimately about the shock of its payoff, which isn't much of a shock and, hence, isn't much of a payoff.

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