The Night House

With a dreadful, disquieting atmosphere pervading its frames and a dark, disturbing mystery simmering beneath the surface, The Night House makes for a gripping, haunting & gradually escalating psychological horror with a plot that only gets more uneasy & uncomfortable as it progresses, and is powerfully anchored by Rebecca Hall's emotionally engrossing showcase.

Directed by David Bruckner (The Ritual), the story explores loss, grief, depression, loneliness, death & longing through vehicles of horror and is able to keep us invested in the proceedings throughout its runtime with surprising ease. Bruckner fills the space with an unnerving chill & sense of dread and unravels the mystery one step at a time but the ending isn't as satisfying as expected.

The isolated setting, silent camerawork, steady pace & smart editing help ratchet the tension when required while the poignant score keeps reminding us of the crushing weight of the void that's opened up in our protagonist's life in the wake of her husband's demise. And rendering her loss & depression with unfailing precision is Rebecca Hall in what's undoubtedly amongst her career-best performances.

Overall, The Night House is an intelligently crafted, skilfully told, effectively shot & brilliantly acted genre offering that quietly immerses the viewers into its unsettling premise and has a firm grip on our emotions before we even know it. Exhibiting first-rate work on all fronts and further bolstered by Hall's committed act, this atmospheric horror does falter in the last act but everything before it is intense & riveting. Don't miss it.

THE NIGHT HOUSE (2021) *** Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Evan Jonigkeit, Stacy Martin. Compelling supernatural drama about a recently widowed woman (Hall in a remarkable performance) who begins to question her sanity when she begins to make discoveries of her late husband's past as well as their home which seems to house a sinister presence. Well directed by David Bruckner with just the amount of dread and genuine jolts thanks also to a shrewd screenplay by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowsk. The pin-pricking score by Ben Lovett & handsomely shot cinematography by Elisha Christian makes all the difference in this modern day ghost story.

... Frightening, Unnerving, Nightmares! The widow of a shock suicide is haunted by dreams and reality from the past, and the present. A towering performance by Rebecca Hall makes all the difference in a story that will leave you scratching your head and your chin but for all the right reasons.

For the first hour of the movie I was very much intrigued by this slowly but effectively unfolding story, getting more and more bewildered, just like main character Beth, by the weird and scary goings-on. The photography is great, and beside a nice sinister atmosphere, there are multiple jump-scares to keep you on the edge of your chair. Rebecca Hall carries the whole movie admirably, she's totally convincing, first as the grieved and forlorn widow of a husband that out of the blue committed suicide, subsequently as the exasperated woman who thinks she's losing her mind. She's not trying to win our sympathy with her aggrieved and angry behavior and her heavy drinking, but you do team up with her when her world turns upside down on her.

Unfortunately in the last half hour, when you expect that all loose ends finally will come together, the story went totally overboard, every other new thing that Beth finds out about her husband only made the narrative get more and more incomprehensible, and at last the weirdness and confusion escalated into a conclusion that was really too mind-boggling, at least for my simple brain.

But maybe expecting some logic in a supernatural ghost story is a bit naive anyway.

Before writing a review I always ask myself two questions. Was I entertained for the entire movie? Was it well made? I have to answer yes on those two questions for The Night House. The story is slow paced but it has a constant intriguing plot that keeps you wondering what is happening. It's not one of those movies you figure out everything from the beginning. There aren't really scary moments, not even jump scares but there's some good suspense and mystery. The acting wasn't bad at all so nothing bad to write about that either. In this genre The Night House is definitely worth a watch.