Mark Reviews Movies: THE NIGHT HOUSE

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 19, 2021

The house is a fine one—plenty of space, a couple of levels, a modern design, a great location next to a lake. A tour of it begins The Night House, as the rooms sit empty—photos of a happy married couple and their equally happy friends lining the walls. Something feels off about the space, though, in the clutter lying around and some dishes left untended—as if the house and life within it were interrupted by an unforeseeable incident. When Beth (Rebecca Hall) returns, arriving at the front door of the home her husband built for them, the sight of her dressed in black and being handed a casserole dish by a friend provides the answer for the source of that interruption.

Beth is now a widow. She has returned to a place of so much joy and comfort and promise, but only silence and grief and empty spaces remain.

Director David Bruckner and cinematographer Elisha Christian establish this pervasive loneliness and absence considerably within the first section of the film, simply by observing the space, leaving things unspoken, and allowing Hall—a great actress in general and exceling in a substantial, challenging role here—the room and freedom to live in and experience all of this pain, mourning, and mounting uncertainty. The mood is one of overwhelming despair and vacancy, so when the silence and the grief and the emptiness are broken by some unknowable presence and some very strange happenings within the house, the effect of them is all the more chilling.

This is, to some extent, a ghost story—about a grieving woman, skeptical about matters spiritual and supernatural and involving some kind of afterlife, who slowly becomes convinced that the spirit of her dead husband is still with her. That's how it begins, at least, but the real success of Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski's screenplay is how this story constantly and consistently evolves.

We think we have a handle on the characters (both living and dead), the secrets, and the mystery of this tale, as Beth searches for answers to her husband's death and only finds answers that make her question what his life actually was. By the time the film's real point comes into focus, though, those mysteries become ones of our most unfathomable knowledge and among the deepest of human fears.

Beth begins going through the motions. She wanders the house, looking at all the unfinished and left-behind things. She starts drinking wine and her late husband's liquor. Beth can't sleep at night (A rather sadly tender moment has Beth's hand reaching for and feeling where her husband would have been). Upon somehow awakening in the morning without knowing sleep, she finds herself in a different room. Wandering to the pier, down some steps alongside a steep drop, Beth is startled by the sound of a gunshot echoing over the water. Her kind and helpful neighbor Mel (Vondie Curtis-Hall) didn't hear it, though.

Trying to get back to normal, she returns to work as a teacher at a local high school, finishing up grades for the end of the school year and opening up to her friend Claire (Sarah Goldberg), the one with the casserole pan. The truth of her husband's death comes to an unsuspecting parent, simply trying to get her son's grade changed. Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) went out on the lake in the rowboat. He undressed, wrote a cryptic note to his wife, and, with a pistol Beth didn't know her husband owned, shot himself.

Beth wants to know why Owen did this. Everyone insists she either won't know or won't like what she discovers. She keeps searching anyway.

Most of this becomes a series of fairly usual sequences. Beth walks around and searches the house or the woods or some previously unknown place within the forest, as some weird things occur—noises, a stereo blasting without Beth turning it on, moving shadows or outlines (From certain points of view, parts of the house's design form silhouette-like lines, which sometimes seem to move), the appearance of bloody or wet footprints, the presence of an invisible figure (We can see Beth's fingertips flatten from touching someone who—or something that—isn't there). Such moments are staged in familiar ways, but Bruckner's methods, which linger on these odd events or let them proceed without a jump-scare punctuation, mean that there's nothing cheap about them.

It's all about creating an atmosphere of the unknown, the ambiguous, and the haunting—both in a psychological and emotional sense, thanks to Hall's dynamic performance, as well as in a more general sense of that word. There's a fine interplay between light and shadow, shapes and perspective, and what we think we're seeing and what's actually there.

That last part becomes the foundation of sorts for the mystery of Owen's life and death. Beth finds a photo on his phone of a woman who vaguely looks like her but could be someone else. The answer, once it obviously isn't Beth in the picture, seems obvious, but then there are more photographs, more books on strange subjects, and more spaces—familiar but with an inverted twist—for Beth to explore. One dark secret begets another, darker possibility, and by the end, Beth must contend with what's essentially the ultimate darkness.

It's necessary to be vague, and that's not just because the evolution of the plot of The Night House does surprise. It's also because the film is more about an increasingly chilling feeling—as a mystery about human frailty and/or wickedness becomes an existentially disquieting one.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products