After a week hiatus from the movies, streaming and in theaters, I finally made my return. The first movie I went to see was Free Guy, which was way better than I was expecting, it still was not great, but I had been expecting it to be horrible. Then I went to go see the real movie I had been waiting for, The Night House, a horror film, which I knew little to nothing about, that was filmed in Syracuse and mentions Utica, and according to the internet the house is probably on Skaneateles Lake. Otherwise, it is hard to tell that it was done locally. It is still cool to live in an area where movies are made even though it is less so than Atlanta. It felt good to be back.
The Night House is a dark story about Beth, who had just become a widow due to her husband's unexpected suicide. She now lives alone in a beautiful house on the lake that her husband designed and then built. Beth is left feeling somewhere between angry and depressed from her sudden loss, but other emotions are quickly added to these, and those are fear and longing. At night, strange occurrences start to happen. Owen, her husband, has seemingly returned. There are strange knocks at the door, footprints down to the dock, and the stereo keeps getting turned on full blast in the middle of the night. Then he starts to communicate with her. Her friends start to feel very concerned for her mental health as she shares some of her findings and thoughts. It also seems Owen was not exactly who she thought he was, he had a much darker side. The movie addresses themes like loss and depression, but it also goes deeper into discussion of the afterlife and some more cosmic ideas played out.
This movie is excellent at creating tension, and continually turning that tension into high quality scares that are at times goosebump inducing and chilling. One of the best qualities of scary movies is that they make you feel something, even some of the worst ones can provoke some fear and feeling unsettled. In this film, as an audience member, it provoked a solid amount of fear and dread. Every time the sun started to go down, or the shot shifted to nighttime, it was clear something supernatural was about to happen, but the director kept the audience on their toes by shifting the ways in which the scares would occur. Sometimes it was the booming of the stereo, and other times it was much more subtle with a shadow of a man. Also much of the emotion created by the film can be credited to the excellent acting of Rebecca Hall. She is the star of the show with very limited help from a supporting cast because this is her journey alone. Her reactions and facial expressions are spot on, and the film would have been much lesser with another actress. Hall buys in fully and pulls the weight successfully.
One of the horror tropes that this film does best is raising the question if Beth, Sarah Hall, is going insane, or is something truly supernatural occurring to her. This was most recently done incredibly well in Saint Maud, where she thought she was having a special relationship with God. As the audience, it was hard to tell if Maud actually had an intimate relationship with God, or if she was just having hallucinations. This film was similar. After losing a loved one, especially in such a traumatic and unexpected way, no one would blame Beth if she was having a mental breakdown and having delusions of her dead husband trying to communicate with her. The late-night experiences she is having are clearly weighing on her, and the few friends she has are clearly worried about her and rightly so. She confides in her best friend about some of the "dreams" she has had, and her friend suggests she stops looking for evidence that Owen was not who he claimed to be, but Beth forges on and ends up going into an even darker place. Owen was into the occult and had created a secret house in the woods. It slowly became clear that he had a secret life Beth had no idea about, so the visions Beth was having at night were leading her here, so it was clear that something supernatural was afoot, unlike in Saint Maud where the ending leaves it up to the audience to interpret whether Maud was divine or insane.
That was the biggest problem of this film. The last ten minutes or so went a little too far. Up to that point, I had been completely engrossed and following the story beat for beat, but then it went further than supernatural and completely cosmic. Beth ended up in some alternate mirror universe. Owen had created a house on the opposite side of the lake, and it worked as some mirroring parallel universe that is hard to explain, and it is still hard to understand after watching. It did serve a purpose to compose all of Owen's misdeeds into one house where the events seemed to be happening concurrently, but it was more disorienting than explicative. It felt like they started to try too hard, and they got away from the formula that was working. The dud of the ending took away from the excellence that had preceded it. It also produced a bleak outlook on the afterlife, in Beth words, “There was nothing.” The Nothing that stalked her down seemed to be a little convincing that there was something worse than an absence of anything, but that something more sinister is waiting.
David Bruckner, the director of this film, has worked on some of my other favorite horror films as well. He was the director of The Ritual, a Netflix horror film that is also deeply rooted in the occult. It is a hiking horror film, where friends try to take a shortcut back to town and end up being part of a ritual for some beast. It was also great, but it struggled to finish strong as well. So clearly Bruckner is great at creating unique and engrossing stories, but he still needs help with the finishing touches, but I would rather watch his higher quality entertaining films than most of the other horror slop that is out there. He is clearly trying to reach deeper themes than just gore and jump scares. He was also a part of the crew for the movie VHS, a horror anthology that I watched multiple times in high school and college, that still has me scared away from roadside motels. He knows what he is doing when it comes to creating tension and suspense, and for that I look forward to his works in the future. I am sure one of them will be a bonafide five stars.
This movie hit a ton of emotional high notes, and it was incredibly entertaining throughout, but it had a hard time hitting the landing. It got a little too convoluted and seemed uncertain of what it wanted to be at the end causing more confusion than answers. Now for a complex subject like the afterlife, and if supernatural events are real, films tend to leave it more ambiguous as to the final verdict, but this one was a little much. Other than that, I would still highly suggest seeing this movie. It was visually appealing from the outfits that the teachers were wearing to the modern architecture of the house, and the house was perched beautifully on the lake. Hall gives an incredible performance well worth watching as well. The music also helps play into the feel of the film from the suspenseful, to the wedding song that Beth and Owen share, The Calvary Cross, which was a good song, but every time it played, it was a key that something was about to go down. I give this film 3.5 stars, but early on it was closing in on a 4.5, it just missed the landing.
Other Movies This Week:
Reminiscence is a crime thriller about a man who uses memories to try to find out what happened to his lost girlfriend. It has a very noir feel, from the music and the voice over. It almost feels like a parody, but that is not the intent. It felt very similar to Inception, but worse. The setting of a partially sunken Miami was great, but that was the best part of the movie.
Free Guy is a video game movie, where Ryan Reynolds plays a non-playable character that turns into artificial intelligence. At times it can be quite funny, and there are a few fun cameos. It never hits at full strength, unless you have a deep connection to the moral debate of if artificial intelligence is alive, but it is enjoyable and fun to watch.
Beckett, is an American whose car crashes into a house, where he sees something he was not supposed to see. Now with his wife dead, he is being chased around the country by dirty cops and politicians as he just tries to make it home. The premise for the movie sounds entertaining, but there was nary a moment when my interests were peaked. John David Washington deserves to be in a better movie than this!
28 Days Later is a zombie film where a crew breaks into a lab to free some monkeys being tested on inhumanly. When they free a monkey, it attacks the girl and thus releases a zombie virus on humanity. When one of the guys in the crew wakes up 28 days later, the world is empty for the most part, he finds a small group to join, but quickly they find out the zombies are not the only humans that have gone rotten.
New Rankings:
The Night House: 3.5 Stars
Reminiscence: 2.5 Stars
Free Guy: 3 Stars
Beckett: 1.5 Stars
28 Days Later: 3 Stars
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