The Hostility of Survival—

A Review in Analysis of Jeffrey A. Brown’s The Beach House

by Nikk Nelson

“That Fall Break we all break, it’s just another day at the baych…”
-Old Mitchum Mob Proverb

Born, raised and living in Kansas, I’ve witnessed my fair share of tornadoes. It’s a terrifying experience, especially when they strike at night. I remember thinking once, the first people that lived through a tornado must have thought the world was ending. Then, the next day, birds and sunshine, like it never happened. And they had to go on living, not knowing what it was, why it happened or if it would ever happen again. I think it’s really difficult to conceptualize billions of years of evolution and remember that moments like that existed for people, once upon a time. That’s right. Strap in. A Kansan is about to write about evolution. Real quick, because it’s this and The Wizard of Oz (1939) that get brought up most when I’m traveling and people find out I’m from Kansas. The whole ‘evolution being taught in Kansas schools’ thing. We are a local control state. We have a ten-member elected state board of education representing ten regions of the state. Two or three board members (not totally representative of the entire state) that had a problem with evolution being taught in schools got elected and made the kind of noise that gets national attention. However, though it seems contradictory, the conversation isn’t indicative of Kansas being a backward state. Were it not for the progressive structure of local control, the conversation would never have happened in the first place. Ergo, we forward. Not saying it’s totally good and always works, just saying, especially over the last ten years, I’m glad our state legislature didn’t have unilateral control over what happened in our schools.

Anywho, Jeffrey A. Brown’s feature debut, The Beach House (2019), I found, at its core, to be about evolution. Specifically, the hostility of survival. In a classic ‘cabin in the woods’ setup, Emily and Randall decide to spend a quiet weekend at Randall’s parents’ beach house to hopefully salvage their relationship. Obviously, horror ensues. Most horror films I’ve encountered over especially the last fifteen years tend to commit the same (what I consider to be) cardinal sins. One, you don’t care enough about the characters to give a shit about anything happening to them. And getting us to care isn’t hard. Take the ‘computer says you’re a dead fuck’ sequence from Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter between Crispin Glover (Jimmy) and Lawrence Monoson (Ted). Just that little bit of character development and establishment of friendship yields audience investment, not just in the characters themselves, but in the larger world the filmmaker is building. Two, there’s no suspense. When it’s obvious some faceless producer said, ‘There needs to be a jump-scare every six pages’, then I become focused on that rhythm and completely lose interest in any other element of the story. And typically, when there are jump scares that often, it’s usually because there isn’t a larger story for the script to depend on. Three, nothing pays off. Rules established for the world are later ignored. Camera holds on things that never come into play. What little information is provided about the characters never affects anything.

The Beach House commits none of these sins. That alone puts it among the best of the genre I’ve seen recently. It builds. Emily and Randall encounter a middle-aged couple already staying at the beach house. For the first half of the movie, the horror could come from any number of directions, and you’re almost relieved when you finally get an idea of it. But it’s just an idea. One of the things I appreciated most about the film was that it wasn’t in a hurry. The composition gets more layered and the shots more complex as it eases you into its uneasiness. And leaves you there. Mostly, you’re left with Liana Liberato, who turns in an incredible performance as Emily. Emily, as a character, is a little out of place. Slightly misfit, especially in her relationship with Randall. It’s exactly this characterization, which is earned, with several small details in the script, that lead me to the theory that this film is really about Emily as the first intelligent life that crawled out of the primordial ooze.

Keeping this as spoiler-free as possible, the moment the horror of the film becomes clear, Emily literally crawls away from the ocean. She spends the next half of the movie trying to survive in a suddenly very hostile world. The horror itself you can compare to any number of things that came before it—The Mist (2007); Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956); Night of the Creeps (1986); Cabin Fever (2002) but The Beach House is singular in my mind from the perspective that Emily is actually the threat that the world is defending itself against. It’s certainly not framed that way as she’s the hero of the film but I found a trove of subtle hints that carried me along in this frame of mind. Think about the first thing that ever crawled out of the ick. It splorched onto an endlessly horrific and hostile world. And, it was itself hostile, perhaps even without the intention of being so. The simple act of crawling over the sand may have meant war for a plant growing on that sand—the horror I found at the center of The Beach House was the complete incertitude of our existence’s affect on the world around us and the world’s affect on us. The acidity of the oozy thing kills the sand plant but not before the sand plant gets all up in its ooze. It crawls back into the water where it thinks its safe but then it passes the sand plant to all of its oozy friends and suddenly the water’s pH shifts and now all the oozy things have to crawl out of the water because it’s no longer habitable. It’s literally all of life, even now for us humans. Navigating a toxic relationship, for example, is just another day in and out of the primordial ick. The closing moment of the film gave me chills—its hopefulness.

The Beach House is one of them thinkin’ horror movies. So anyone expecting fast pace, jump scares, gore galore and everything spelled out for you will definitely want to look elsewhere. I can’t wait for what comes next from Jeffrey A. Brown. Once again, I’m thrilled that Shudder is featuring films like this when it has the choice to pander more to what’s popular. It is an affecting film which almost guarantees its misfit in the genre. But I think that’s exactly where it intended to belong. It’s body horror on a molecular level—a meditation on the delicacy of ecosystem and the terrifying aspects of physical and chemical change, in a world and in a self, where nothing ever stays the same.

Look for The Beach House to be available for streaming exclusively on Shudder July 9th.