The Night House (2021)

 Score: 5 / 5

Beth is in misery. Her husband Owen recently went out on a boat from their gorgeous house on a lake and shot himself in the head. She says he exhibited no depression, and she didn't even know he had a gun; his suicide note indicates that nothing is after her and that "You're safe now." Her grief is paired with anger and bewilderment -- she says she was the one who had once struggled with depression, not Owen -- and she struggles to continue her work as a teacher. Spending her nights drinking and tearfully going through his belongings, she starts noticing odd happenings like disembodied footsteps upstairs and the stereo turning on in the dead of night. Could it be the restless spirit of her beloved, or does she just want him back?

In Owen's boxes, she uncovers books about the occult with his handwritten notes. She sees blueprints for their lake house in reverse. Across the dark water, she starts to see lights of a house that looks disturbingly like her own. And on his computer, she finds photos of another woman a little too similar to Beth. What was her husband doing? What was he into? And why does she keep seeing ghostly women wandering around her property and in her dreams, all of whom look a lot like herself? It's a delicious mystery, one that unfolds in a dementedly languid pace even as I wished things would slow down so I could more carefully catalog the intense emotional weight of each new revelation.

Rebecca Hall takes this role in her stride, using it as a vehicle to hijack the whole movie. She steals every scene, chewing away even as she spends most of her time wiping away tears beneath terrified, wide-eyed stares. It's the kind of powerhouse leading woman we saw Nicole Kidman ace in The Others or Jennifer Lawrence in mother!, women whose strength is in their (culturally determined) weakness and whose terror is desperately emotional and rooted in her experience as women. She deftly combines her sorrow with anger and suspicion and confusion, and gives us just the right injections of morbid humor to be startlingly funny. Her character is as much a survivor as she is an investigator, and as she unfolds the mysteries of her life, she realizes the horrors hemming her in and braces herself for the coming fight.

I don't want to spoil too much (but I'm about to, so stop reading if that's your kink), but know that this movie requires a lot of interpretation on our part to make sense. This is because, in my viewing of it, The Night House is primarily an allegory of depression and suicide. Beth, who is herself a survivor of a deadly experience, seems hounded by death, which she refers to as "nothing." That nothingness is what she experienced when declared dead for four full minutes, and she now carries that nihilism within her consciousness. She worries that her experiences are infectious, and indeed if it is ultimately her fault that her husband killed himself. She may be more right than she knows, and as she learns about the "nothing" that hunts her, she hears that it had spent years whispering in Owen's ears. But one could also easily read this movie as a straightforward movie with a particularly iconic evil spirit (the production designer and cinematographer do stunning work shaping negative spaces into the "nothing" demon), and it's the rare film that fully works in both interpretations separately, and even better together.

In this way, the movie reminded me distinctly of Relic, which could be a simple house-haunting and could be a complex allegory to dementia and aging. Together, it's an irresistible, haunting exploration of both as they inform each other.

Further, this movie leaves us its share of mysteries, even once the credits begin to roll. While there is surely a deeper significance to various symbols -- the misogynistic sculpture, the red moon, the not-quite labyrinthine maze -- none are explicitly clear. At least not on the first viewing. It seems the caerdroia maze is meant to confuse or weaken dark spirits, which more or less leads into the reflected house and body doubling tactics employed by Owen. A blood moon, biblically, signifies the beginning of the end times. The sculpture, dubiously referred to as a Voodoo doll, seems to signify sacrifice and mystically binds whoever holds it to the dark spirit, or marks them as an intended sacrifice for it. These are briefly hinted at in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot at a book Beth skims, and would probably make more sense upon subsequent viewings. But they are as vague as elements of Prisoners or The Little Stranger, and those haunting stories are so chilling because they don't spell out each dark mystery.

Actually, this movie reminds me a lot of classic, old ghost movies like The Innocents and The Haunting, and their source materials, because of its rich, foreboding mood and its dense psychological realism. Director David Bruckner (if you haven't seen The Ritual yet, it's on Netflix) fluidly ingratiates us into Beth's uncomfortable existence until neither she nor we can tell what is real, what is imagined, and what is threatening. Ghosts run amok, but are they caused by a somnambulist's fever dream, her hopes and fears as her husband's identity is revealed, or perhaps manifestations of a malicious spirit hunting her? The most amazing thing about this particular story, written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski as an original screenplay, is that the answer seems to be YES. It's all almost more interesting because the various possibilities only heighten the tension of the others. Isn't it scarier to know that your delusional fear and exhaustion might make you more susceptible to a demon's influence, or that learning the truth about your life can make you start to lose your own sanity?

Its impressionistic imagery -- thickly captured by cinematographer Elisha Christian -- and amazing sound design make this movie an immersive Gothic experience where the memory of horrors is often as dangerous as the unseen ones around us. I cannot speak highly enough of this movie, nor of the exhilaration of seeing it in a darkened theater on a huge screen with surround sound. This is the kind of quiet, contemplative horror movie that would have worked perfectly without its jump-scares, but whose jump-scares are so effective that I wanted more even as I white-knuckled the armrests.