{"id":9854,"date":"2024-12-10T23:17:38","date_gmt":"2024-12-11T04:17:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=9854"},"modified":"2024-12-10T23:17:38","modified_gmt":"2024-12-11T04:17:38","slug":"the-night-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/12\/10\/the-night-house\/","title":{"rendered":"The Night House"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The Night House <\/strong>(2021)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Searchlight\/Horror-Thriller\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 108 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (some violence\/disturbing images, language including some sexual references)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: David Bruckner\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Ben Lovett\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Elisha Christian\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: August 20, 2021 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Evan Jonigkeit, Stacy Martin, Vondie Curtis-Hall, David Abeles, Christina Jackson, Patrick Klein, Jacob Garrett White, Samantha Buck, Laura Austin.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $7.1M (US)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: **<\/p>\n

\u00a0A few weeks ago, I criticized M. Night Shyamalan\u2019s latest horror-thriller Old for overexplaining itself. The Night House<\/strong>, directed by David Bruckner (The Ritual), doesn\u2019t explain itself enough. I left the theater feeling confused. Did I miss something? I get all the stuff about the ghosts leading the protagonist to a shocking secret about her recently deceased husband, but I don\u2019t understand how the alternate mirror-image reality ties in. A plausible theory still eludes me even after I took the time to sleep on it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Rebecca Hall (Godzilla vs. Kong) plays Beth, a teacher coping with grief following the unexpected suicide of her husband Owen (Jonigkeit, Bone Tomahawk). She never saw it coming. One morning, he set out on the lake in their rowboat, put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Beth says she just wants to get on with her life, but her erratic behavior tells a different story. She spends her nights drinking and going through his belongings. There\u2019s also the matter of a mysterious suicide note assuring Beth that she\u2019s safe. Already unstable, she becomes more so when weird supernatural things start happening- e.g. ghosts, strange visions and things going bump in the night. The phenomena is connected to pictures of several women, including a young book store employee (Martin, Vox Lux), Beth finds on Owen\u2019s phone. The women all resemble her. It all leads to a horrifying discovery about her late husband.<\/p>\n

\u00a0This is where The Night House<\/strong> lost me. Among Owen\u2019s things, Beth finds a floor plan for a reverse version of their lake house. She finds such a house in the woods across the lake. Dormant by day, it comes to life at night. For whatever reason, it takes her into a mirror-image reality. As I write these words, I\u2019m still trying to put it all together. All I can come up with is it involves the occult which isn\u2019t much of an explanation at all. It\u2019s more of a catch-all category used to explain that which can\u2019t be explained by science or a faulty screenplay.<\/p>\n

\u00a0It\u2019s one thing for a film to leave the viewer\u2019s mind reeling. It\u2019s quite another to leave the audience confounded. If done right, it\u2019s fun to come up ideas and theories that might or might not explain a movie. Two perfect examples are the original Jacob\u2019s Ladder (screw the remake!) and David Lynch\u2019s Mulholland Drive. I\u2019ve had brilliant conversations about both films. I wish I could say the same of The Night House<\/strong>. After a promising start, it loses its footing and stumbles around never connecting its ideas. That\u2019s not the only problem. It\u2019s also slow and boring. The Sixth Sense overcame that by Shyamalan throwing in a few really good jolts. Bruckner does no such thing, at least not in an effective manner. The Night House<\/strong> isn\u2019t scary, suspenseful or surprising. Some of it is fairly predictable. I guessed the husband\u2019s secret very early on. It isn\u2019t hard to figure out if you\u2019re paying attention.<\/p>\n

\u00a0One of the better aspects of The Night House<\/strong> is Hall\u2019s performance as a grief-stricken widow trying to come to terms with her loss. She\u2019s a fine actress in that she has credibility. She\u2019s believable in a lot of different roles. She brings this quality to Beth whose emotional state runs the gamut from numb to fits of anger, depression, hurt and laughter. It all comes with a side of confusion from being left with questions that will go unanswered. That\u2019s in addition to being haunted by a specter that leads her to dark places both internally and externally. To others, like colleague\/bff Claire (Goldberg, Barry) and elderly neighbor Mel (Hall, Romeo + Juliet), it looks like she\u2019s losing her already tenuous grip on reality. That\u2019s the thing about grief. It hits everybody differently and manifests in a number of different ways. Bruckner and the writers (Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski) get this part right. They don\u2019t build on it effectively.<\/p>\n

\u00a0There are times when you can see the good movie The Night House<\/strong> could have been had the makers made clearer their intentions with the plot. I\u2019m not saying they should have spelled it out; it\u2019s good to make the audience think. They simply needed to make the story tighter. And while there\u2019s no lack of atmosphere, Bruckner fails to augment it with a few well-placed \u201cBOO!\u201d scenes. In the end, The Night House<\/strong> is disappointingly lame. Also, I don\u2019t like it when a movie makes me feel stupid. I still can\u2019t make sense of it and it\u2019s not a good feeling. It\u2019s just as well since I\u2019m not inclined to think on it anymore.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Night House (2021)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Searchlight\/Horror-Thriller\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 108 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (some violence\/disturbing images, language including some sexual references)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: David Bruckner\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Ben Lovett\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Elisha Christian\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: August 20, 2021 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Evan Jonigkeit, Stacy Martin, Vondie Curtis-Hall, David Abeles, Christina Jackson, Patrick […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10139,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-horror"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/The-Night-House-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9854"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10141,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9854\/revisions\/10141"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}