A husband’s suicide haunts Rebecca Hall — literally
Rebecca Hall is the whole, compelling show in the modestly scaled chiller “The Night House,” set in a carefully designed riddle of a lakeside home somewhere in upstate New York.
As with any effective screen tale of a haunting, and the haunted, the protagonist here, schoolteacher Beth, serves as audience conduit as well as human reaction machine. Many sequences pull us in with tense, nonverbal gradations of dread, without a lot of obvious engineering beyond the expected jump scares (including one terrific jolt). Hall excels in every detail, with each catch of the breath and dawning realization that she is not alone. And she’s not sure if she’s bad with that, or good.
At the start Beth is, in fact, newly and tragically alone. Her architect and contractor husband, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit), has recently killed himself, leaving behind a cryptic suicide note. Among the boxes she has yet to seal and remove from her life, Beth finds the bound edition of their home’s complicated, mazelike blueprints. These are filled with jottings such as “trick it, don’t listen to it” and “reverse floor plan.”
For a while in “The Night House,” we never know if Beth’s nightmares — sudden, shadowy flashes of Owen in a window or a mirror, or music from the stereo scaring Beth awake — are sleeping nightmares or waking ones. Beth also finds underlined sections of a book dealing with Celtic mythology, with references to “reverse spaces intended to confuse or weaken dark forces.”
Director David Bruckner, working from a script by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, reveals a few clues fairly early on regarding the man Beth thought she knew. Turns out there’s another house, across the lake near where Beth’s friend Mel (Vondie CurtisHall) lives. Beth’s friend and fellow teacher Claire (the terrific Sarah Goldberg, so good in “Barry”) knows more about Owen’s secrets than she’s letting on. Maybe. Does she? Beth doesn’t know whom to trust, and as “The Night House” spins its methodical web of confusions, Hall keeps it all human-scaled rather than genre-dictated.
Things do fall apart a bit toward the end. The explanations become plainer, yet murkier, which is both a paradox and a frustration. Yet the key performance here never falters, and the “major actress in the making” I wrote about 13 years ago acquitted herself
as major long before 2021. Hall’s range is formidable, and on the New York stage, in Sophie Treadwell’s jazzage drama “Machinal,” she created a thrillingly vivid tragic hero out of what could’ve been an antiquated damsel in distress. In “The Night House,” narratively faulty but full of insinuating shivers, Hall once again expands her range. She intensifies what could’ve been just another woman with a flashlight in a haunted house movie, peering into the beyond.
MPAA rating: R (for language, some violence, disturbing images, some sexual references) Running time: 1:48 How to watch: Now in theaters. Streaming premiere TBA.