The Night House | Little White Lies

The Night House

16 Aug 2021 / Released: 20 Aug 2021

Close-up of a woman with a determined expression, illuminated by a torch in a dark setting.
Close-up of a woman with a determined expression, illuminated by a torch in a dark setting.
3

Anticipation.

Promises to haunt audiences and execute shocks with precision.

4

Enjoyment.

Rebecca Hall gives a staggering performance.

3

In Retrospect.

Intense and well-made, yet the narrative becomes tangled up in itself.

David Bruckner’s archi­tec­tur­al hor­ror stands up to the con­tem­po­rary chal­lenges of dab­bling with ghosts and jump scares.

Left alone in an iso­lat­ed and cav­ernous lake­side home after her hus­band Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) com­mits sui­cide, Beth (Rebec­ca Hall) is left with com­plex feel­ings of grief and a fierce yearn­ing for answers. As cracks in their mar­riage begin to show, she starts to uncov­er a series of dis­turb­ing secrets that lead her to ques­tion who her hus­band real­ly was. We then enter an unex­pect­ed­ly strange, dark and mys­te­ri­ous ter­rain as she begins to close­ly exam­ine his belongings.

Sus­tain­ing a pal­pa­ble sense of sus­pense through­out a hor­ror film is no easy task, but The Night House’s enig­mat­ic sequences of invert­ed dream states and intri­cate archi­tec­tur­al spaces man­age to blur the line between real­i­ty and delu­sion to great effect. Visu­al­ly, the con­stant shifts in per­spec­tive mark a bold cre­ative choice by direc­tor David Bruck­n­er and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Elisha Chris­t­ian, who treat this mod­ern haunt­ed house almost as if it were a main character.

Opti­cal illu­sions and omi­nous reflec­tions induce a dif­fer­ent kind of fear when ser­vic­ing jump scares. Ben Lovett’s eerie score inten­si­fies the spa­tial­ly dis­ori­ent­ing pro­duc­tion design, aug­ment­ing the already haunt­ing and claus­tro­pho­bic atmos­phere. There are some tired tropes present – words writ­ten on fog­gy bath­room mir­rors, a stereo sys­tem wak­ing Beth up in the mid­dle of the night of its own accord while doors slam and lights flick­er – but they don’t over­shad­ow the orig­i­nal­i­ty of the story.

Although the last half of the film is clut­tered and repet­i­tive, The Night House is worth watch­ing for Hall’s out­stand­ing per­for­mance. Her ele­gant por­tray­al of a tor­ment­ed wid­ow evokes Michelle Pfeif­fer in What Lies Beneath, while both films share sim­i­lar pat­terns of sus­pense­ful storytelling.

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