"The Night House" (2020) - Movie Review

Held together by Rebecca Hall's strong performance, "The Night House" is a well-shot atmospheric horror that unfortunately rushes its ambiguous ending.

I saw the artwork on HBO and thought it looked interesting -- a woman under a red moon, by a dark lake, reaching out into thin air, but upon closer inspection something invisible is reaching out to her which looked spooky.

I recognize the lead, Rebecca Hall, from Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (2006) where she played Christian Bale's wife, the titular Vicky in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Johnny Depp's wife in 2014's Transcendence, and most recently the lead monster-linguist in last year's Godzilla vs Kong.

Hall also reminds me a little of Shelley Duvall.

Anyway, back to her lead role as Beth in the movie "The Night House."

For starters this movie is beautifully shot: the way it cuts and lingers on scenery, set pieces, and Rebecca Hall herself was haunting enough. The movie does a great job of pointing out how alone she is, which is fitting since the story opens with her returning home from her husband Owen's funeral. The two live--or lived--in a lake house with a steep staircase down to a small dock where, one day, Beth's husband took their rowboat out to the middle of the water and shot himself with a gun she never knew he even owned. "The Night House" is about loss but also emptiness. This is emphasized by a lot of shots of empty expanses, empty stairs, the empty open water of the lake ...

... And architectural designs built around openings and doorways. This initial and repeated theme of emptiness is soon disturbed by notions, hints, and heavy evidence that, despite Owen's passing, Beth is not alone in their house. Something is there, something that wants not just to communicate with her but much more.

Beth assumes for most of the movie that the presence trying to connect with her is her husband Owen. Unlike her, he had no history of depression or mental illness, and to her was a positive and cheery person, so his sudden suicide is jarring for her, rightfully so. One day someone she loved seemed perfectly okay and then without warning or explanation that loved one removed themselves from the world.

Actually, to say "without explanation" isn't completely accurate. Owen left Beth a short note before his passing: "You were right. There's nothing. There's nothing after you. You're safe now." She reveals this to her best friend and fellow teacher co-workers over drinks and it makes for an exquisitely socially awkward scene -- professionals trying to pass the time and discuss work problems while trying to comfort but not focus on a peer's dramatic personal issue.

It's a classic issue, explaining loss to those who haven't recently, or at all, experienced that type of trauma. Losing a family member, a spouse, especially one of Beth and Owen's relationship -- 14 years -- puts a permanent filter or tint on a person's viewing of life. Hopefully a tinting that grows less dark over time.

Without spoiling much, what Beth assumes is Owen begins contacting her through the house and eventually lures her to an incomplete reverse-copy of their home on the opposite side of the lake, deep in a federal nature reserve where no structures are supposed to be built.

One of the ways this ghostly presence contacts Beth is through a song that is repeatedly and spontaneously played in the house. The sudden sound of the song's intro blasts into the house at night, over and over.

You can check out the song here on Youtube: "Calvary Cross" by Richard and Linda Thompson. The opening lyrics are quite haunting:

🎵
I was under the Calvary Cross
The pale faced lady, she said to me
I've watched you with my one green eye
And I'll hurt you till you need me
You scuff your heels and you spit on your shoes
You do nothing with reason
One day you catch a train
Never leaves the station
🎵

At first, "The Night House" seems to be purely about loss and the psychological and physiological effects of that. We're led to think that the voices, the objects, the music, that it's all in Beth's head -- even the house across the lake, the reverse house, the Night House, but we're not ever really sure because she's seen medicating her grief with endless glasses of brandy.

But when Beth finds a grotesque wooden artifact or sculpture depicting a repeatedly skewered naked female form, we begin to wonder if she isn't crazy. If there was more to her husband Owen's death ...

... In the beginning, I wondered if the night house that Beth discovers was a figment of her imagination despite it being the location in which she discovers the artifact, which I will call the skewered lady. But later both the night house and the skewered lady are revealed to be real when a "friend" of her late husband reveals that he had taken her to the night house, and then later Beth shows a friend the skewered lady.

I wish I could explain more but that would spoil the rest of the movie and "The Night House" is a decent movie, although its ending was, as initially mentioned, very rushed.

There may or may not be otherworldly forces in the film, which are left up to interpretation. Was it an actual ethereal intrusion into the mundane or the pains of a woman suddenly left alone in the world without the man she loved?

In conclusion, I enjoyed "The Night House".

In comparison to other horror movies, I've watched lately:

Universes better than Netflix's 2022 "Chainsaw Massacre" in acting, production, and story.
Almost as good as 2013's "Mama," but not quite.
I can confidently say that "The Night House" was shot a lot better, and while no one in Mama's cast shined brighter than Rebecca Hall, The Night House failed to make me care about anyone else beside Beth and her best friend, which felt odd since the movie was about the loss of her husband Owen.
There are some very decent special effects in "The Night House" but the antagonist of the film -- how do I say this without spoiling anything ... -- lacks the substance necessary for a true horror villain.