THINGS THAT GO BUMP
The Night House will keep you awake with its dark look at the architecture of fear
I slept poorly after returning home from a screening of
The Night House. Insomnia is a strange way to make a plug for a film — though a plug is what this ultimately is — and one that, while fitting, requires some qualification. Director David Bruckner's carefully calibrated hybrid horror story (one that teeters, mostly tantalizingly, between the psychological and the supernatural) takes place largely at night.
Sharply written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, the story focuses on the experiences of a woman whose husband has just killed himself. In the wake, Beth (Rebecca Hall) starts seeing and hearing things, but her perceptions may be distorted by sleeplessness, grief and alcohol.
Are the noises she hears, the unseen presence she senses, and the electronics that come on at 4 a.m. signs of poltergeist activity, as they would be in almost any other film of this sort? Or are they symptoms of either sleep paralysis or its converse, sleepwalking?
Those questions trouble the early scenes of the film, in a way that takes hold of you. But later, as The Night House evolves from a metaphor for the sleeping brain to something more literal, and ultimately less satisfying, it leaves you with other, darker thoughts.
Hall is excellent as a college professor whose husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit, seen in flashbacks and apparitions) has just shot himself in a rowboat on the lake next to the house he designed and built for them. Beth isn't handling the tragedy well. Her best friend Claire (Sarah Goldberg) and neighbour Mel (Vondie Curtis-Hall) have noticed.
Soon though, there is firmer evidence of a deeper, more earthly mystery: Beth discovers photos on her husband's phone of several women, all of whom look a little like her. His notebooks are filled with architectural renderings of a mirror image of their house, and disturbing notations. There's a creepy talisman.
Bruckner constructs a seductive maze of false starts, dead ends and dark hallways, both the literal and the metaphorical kind, as Beth probes these enigmas. Cinematographer Elisha Christian is adept at rendering the kind of shadowy bogeyman figures that haunt the wee hours but turn out to be just shadows in a dark corner. Prepare yourself to be on sustained edge, because The Night House will play you like an out-of-tune violin.
It is in this foggy realm that the film's strengths lie. Beth's confusion is palpable, and her inability to think her way out of it genuinely terrifying.
But gradually, in pursuit of an explanation other than Beth's own lying eyes, the film ventures into territory that's familiar. To wit: a literal — if incorporeal — bugaboo, the kind that's plagued and marred many an otherwise impeccable, even artful, horror film, as this one is. Still, The Night House is, in the truest sense of the word, kind of haunting.