The Night House (2021)

Directed by David Bruckner

For those of you who have never heard of this movie, don’t worry, I had no idea it was coming out either. I try to stay on top of the new release schedule but for some reason, this one slipped by me until a few days ago, which I must shamefully mark as a personal failure of a wannabe movie critic. But with the wacky release schedules of everything right now, it is understandable though to lose track so I guess I can absolve myself of this crime. With that inner turmoil solved, let’s get into The Night House, a movie I knew nothing about going in, save two things, 1) It’s a horror movie, and 2) It’s a ghost story. That’s enough for me to give it a shot, but did The Night House manage to exceed the no expectations I went in with?

Just Enough Story To Not Give Anything Away.

After the death of her husband, Owen, Beth finds it understandably difficult to get on with her life. While undertaking the sad task of gathering her husband’s belongings, Beth makes an odd discovery, throwing into question everything Beth thought she knew about Owen. With her curiosity and grief intermingling, Beth starts down a dangerous path, one whose answers she might not like.

What A Change Of Pace This Was!

For a while, I’ve been having a bit of a rough time with movies. For the past few weeks, it’s been nothing but dud after dud, movies not good enough to be recommended or bad enough to be mocked. I was honestly getting worried, worried that I had stopped liking movies, stopped feeling passionate about them. Fortunately, I can confirm that is not the case, because I walked out of The Night House positively glowing. The last time I walked out of a movie this happy was when I saw The Lighthouse, which was my 2019 movie of the year, and while I don’t think The Night House is quite THAT great, it’s a damn good movie. One that is going to go down with the greats of the ghastly subgenre.

Stylish And A Great Take On Hauntings.

So much about The Night House works that it’s hard to narrow it down, but I guess I should get specific so you may know a little bit more than I did about what to expect going in. This is kind of an old-school horror film, very much in the tradition of slow-burn classics where the deliberate pacing enhances the restrained and often understated nature of The Night House. Most of the horror here is suggestive, forcing you to wrap your head around the refiguring of older concepts through unfamiliar visuals, recreating the mystery and eerie nature lost to the normalization of ‘standard’ horror visuals. It almost never goes full Avant-garde, just weird enough that you question exactly what’s happening, but clear enough that you know something is happening and is certainly unnerving.

Quality Performances From A Good Cast!

A personal love of mine is how well this movie handles all its characters. No one here is an asshole just for the sake of cheap drama, an unfortunate scenario that has plagued movies probably since their conception. Everyone, even the people who are passive-aggressive or patronizing, feels like real people in a bad situation just trying to make the best of what’s going on and offer what support they can. There’s a whole other layer of horror with this that I love, the main horror of going down a rabbit hole that you probably should not be going down, and the opposite side of that where you witness someone you love harming themselves and not being able to, or even knowing how to, give them what they need to be better. The entire cast is great here, Rebecca Hall carries The Night House as Beth with a big, deeply emotional performance, but the supporting cast works just as hard, creating a cavalcade of minor characters who all feel like real people you will encounter after a profound loss.

Is This Fear I’m Experiencing?

There’s always been a lot of discussion regarding whether or not a horror movie needs to be scary to be a good movie. I understand that fear is subjective, that movies that are scary to one person might not necessarily be scary to another, but in my mind a movie does kind of need to be scary, or at least attempt to be scary, to be a horror movie, it’s right there in the name. The Night House doesn’t have this problem, it is shockingly effective at raising tension and filling you with dread. That feeling of controlled anxiety, sitting in a quiet movie theater just waiting for the tension on-screen to come to a head, this is why movies are made. It’s refreshing, to say the least.

And On That Note, It Is Time To Scour The Rest Of Bruckner’s Filmography.

If this all just sounds like gushing, well, it’s because I don’t have anything too negative to say about The Night House. Stylish throughout, The Night House serves as a revival of classic ghost stories, reinvigorating the genre in much the same way as Hereditary did years before and repackaging it for a new audience. I can’t rightly say if this movie will be as successful as it deserves to be, its marketing has been downright dismal, but I encourage everyone to see this if any of what I’ve described here sounds even remotely interesting. If you’re not comfortable returning to movie theatres right now I completely get it, but the theatres playing this movie probably won’t be packed. Or you could just wait to get in VoD. I’m not making any money off this, either way, I just want you all to see a good movie.