Home alone?
Ghost story The Night House might leave you sleeping with the light on as Rebecca Hall’s widow deals with the twin horrors of grief and a ghostly presence. GEORGIA HUMPHREYS chats to the star and director David Bruckner
REBECCA HALL has a rigorous routine to help shake off a day on set.
When making new horror film The Night House, the London-born star would “take the make-up off, take the costumes off, I go home, it’s over; I don’t think about it until the next day”.
“Otherwise, I can lose my mind,” continues the 39-year-old, who is married to actor Morgan Spector. “But it does spill in – of course it does. I don’t think I was too scared. I had a one-yearold at home at the time, so I got home, and I was far from being alone, ever.”
Written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, and directed by David Bruckner, The Night House sees Rebecca – probably best known for Woody Allen’s romantic comedy-drama Vicky Cristina Barcelona – playing Beth, a teacher whose husband, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit), has recently taken his own life.
Still reeling from being unexpectedly widowed and living alone in their lakeside home, she starts having disturbing nightmares and visions of a ghostly presence in the house calling to her.
When she starts digging into her husband’s past, searching through his belongings for answers about his death, she discovers unnerving secrets. It’s a mysterious and chilling tale, which David couldn’t get out of his head when he first read his friends’ script.
“I found it troubling. I was joking it just wouldn’t leave me alone, and I realised that was a good thing,” says the American film-maker, who is famous for horrors The Ritual and The Signal. “And the fact that there were issues in it that I couldn’t resolve for myself felt like a really great reason to make a movie.”
“It [The Night House] deals with the concept of meaninglessness in a way that’s very frank and stark that scares me a bit,” he elaborates. “As an undercurrent to a horror film, I felt that I hadn’t really seen that addressed that way. It’s not often that I’m frightened by the movies that I’m making, so I thought that was particularly intense.”
The film was made in 2019 and was a huge hit when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year, but, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, its release in cinemas has been delayed until now.
Prepare yourself for not only a genuinely terrifying watch but also a poignant exploration of “very specific time in the passage of grief that I don’t think we see all that often in films”, suggests Rebecca.
“We see the few weeks after a death when the grieving has really started, and we see the immediate aftermath – pre the funeral – a lot in films, when everyone’s very shocked and crying a lot.
“But this patch, which starts directly after the funeral, when everyone says bye-bye and leaves Beth on her own... You could argue that the film is an exploration of getting to the point of being able to actually cry about it and take in what has happened, as opposed to the shock.”
David adds that “the film explores a lot about how we affect one another, about how intertwined a marriage can be, and how the emotions and the state of mind of one partner really finds its way into the interior of another partner.
“That’s represented in the grief as well, and the arc that Beth goes through in the wake of her husband’s loss. There is a romance to that, that is hopeful. It’s good to feel, as opposed to not feel.”
Rebecca’s performance is mesmerising for many reasons, including the fact that, for the majority of the film, it’s just her character alone in a house.
This made it very challenging, she admits.
“It’s quite a lot to shoulder and keep going and just keep your stamina going, frankly. And some of the physical stuff was unlike anything I’d done before and was quite loose and intuitive sometimes. I was grateful for that, but it also probably left me looking a little silly at times.”
Rebecca – whose mother is opera singer Maria Ewing – first appeared on our screens as a 10-year-old, starring in a television adaptation of The Camomile Lawn in 1992, which was directed by her father, the late Sir Peter Hall (who was also the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company).
She made her stage debut a decade later, and then came films, such as The Prestige, a thriller by Christopher Nolan which was her breakout role. She has also starred in TV series such as Channel 4’s Red Riding: 1974 and Parade’s End on BBC2.
“I have been doing it a really long time, as it turns out,” she quips of her acting career.
Asked what she has learned from growing up in the industry, she says: “I suppose all of it has been a process of learning to live with the experience and reduce your expectations of anything beyond that.”
She senses there has been a “real shift” when it comes to female empowerment in Hollywood and beyond in the last few years.
“It’s noticeable; the scripts, even the way people talk about it in meetings,” she adds.
“Even in my early 20s, people were talking about, ‘We must champion strong female leads’, and ‘This is going to be a strong female lead’, and, honestly, I have played a lot of ‘strong female leads’ but that is not enough.
“There’s got to be room for complexity and humanity and all of the stories that exist for all the genders and all the minorities, which is happening, and that seems real for the first time.”
I found it troubling, and I was joking it just wouldn’t leave me alone Director David Bruckner on the film’s script
■ The Night House is in cinemas now.