Directed by David Bruckner
Written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski
Starring Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Evan Jonigkeit, Stacy Martin
Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes
In theaters August 20

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

It's painful, watching a great movie slip and become a good one. And I know that by opening there, I need to immediately assert that The Night House, the new horror film from director David Bruckner, is not bad. It is, in fact, pretty wonderful for the most part. But when a movie starts this well, you just want it to stay there. It's clear everybody here is talented and that they're approaching familiar horror ideas from thoughtful angles. They just can't keep up the pace.

Bruckner and star Rebecca Hall are the two forces around which everything else here revolves. Bruckner made his feature debut with the pretty good folk horror film The Ritual, but if you want to see him at the peak of his powers, you'd be better served looking up the shorts he wrote and directed for a few of the past decade's big anthologies. After making "Amateur Night," a stand-out from the first V/H/S collection, he created Southbound's "The Accident," full-stop one of the great horror things-- film, book, video game, haunted house, you name it-- of the 21st century. Not many people are capable of putting together something on the level of "The Accident," so when you find somebody who is, you give them a lifetime on your watchlist.

Hall is more of a known quantity, one of those people who steals movies, even if those movies are otherwise not great. For every very good film she's in (Christine, Please Give, Iron Man 3), there are a couple bad ones on her resume (her last two features were Holmes and Watson and the 2019 annual Woody Allen rerun that hit right around the time everybody suddenly remembered Woody's an unrepentant pedophile rapist. So, not great). She's been in horror movies, but never good ones, and so it's a relief to watch her dig into something well-written. Rebecca Hall was in Transference. She deserves a couple Night Houses.

And it's good that she's up to the task, because so much of The Night House is a one-person show. Hall plays a teacher on summer break, trying to put her life back together after her husband's sudden suicide. She sees a friend regularly (the always great Sarah Goldberg) and occasionally runs into a friendly neighbor, but most of her nights are spent alone, in her remote lake house, wondering why the person she loved took a boat out and shot himself.

It's a horror film where grief is the central metaphor, which is an idea directors have always tackled but which seems to be especially popular right now. Usually, that grief looks like Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now, which is to say it manifests as confusion, disorientation and malaise. Hall plays a kind of grief you don't see much in movies, horror or otherwise. She's confused and she's never going to get any answers, yes, but she's also fed up and a little pissed. She misses her husband deeply but also wishes he had the courtesy to leave a more descriptive note behind so she could know why.

That's the other main theme: How much should you know about a person? While things get supernaturally spooky around the lake house and Bruckner pulls off a series of impressive set pieces, Hall's character clings to what little clues she can find that her husband had a secret life. There are pictures of a woman who looks just like Hall on his phone and, pivotally, there are the foundations of a secret second house, a mirrored copy of the one he shared with Hall's character, on the other side of the lake. The question isn't even really "Would you be more or less fulfilled knowing your loving partner had dark secrets?" It's more about what good the actual act of digging up those secrets would mean to a person.

I've barely talked about the scares because they are, for the most part, unique, and explaining them would totally diminish their impact. Outside of a few cheap sound design blow-outs, the stuff that makes you jump is tiny. Here's one example, unfortunately spoiled in the movie's trailer, that I will get nowhere close to properly conveying: at one point, the molding on a column in the mirrored house looks like the dead character's profile. And then it turns to look at Hall. The Night House's best moments are like that. I can't say "It's scary when the protagonist is being chased" or "The audience slowly realizes there's a person behind the hero." It's all "Hall's fingertips press in as if she's touching a person, but we can't see anybody."

Bruckner is a wizard and that's all effective. Ultimately, ironically, it's the movie's insistence on digging for answers that ends up killing it. The first half of The Night House is a pummeling experience (and, not for nothing, features a few hilarious jokes, which horror movies too often skip, to their detriment). The closer we get to the husband's past, though, the more confusing the plot gets, the less intense the experience is, the harder it is to care. Hall stays on fire the entire time, but by the film's end, it's hard to tell what she's supposed to be reacting to. The "final showdown," as it is, gets so abstract that, and I guess this is a spoiler, Hall's essentially fighting the idea of nothing. Not apathy or depression, which had been hinted at earlier, but nothing, which she may have given to her husband. I could break that down to mean that by discussing her sadness, the character transferred all of that anxiety and gloom over to an otherwise upbeat guy. It's a dangerous message you'd have to fall backward into making. But I don't know that it's fair to interpret it that way, simply because I don't know if it's fair to have any coherent thoughts on the way The Night House ends. It is a very good movie and then it is a good movie and then who even knows.