The Night House

"Everybody has secrets".  -  Dialogue from The Night House.

This is very true, but not everybody has the kind of secrets that Beth (Rebecca Hall) discovers about her late husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) after his recent suicide.  The Night House is a slow-burn paranormal thriller that burns a bit too slowly for my liking, and too frequently seems to be spinning its wheels, or repeating old spook-house cliches of banging on the walls, and secrets of the past coming to light.  Oh, it's beautifully made and well-acted, I will grant it that.  But it's never thrilling or exciting.

I also found poor Beth's situation a bit hard to swallow.  She's all alone in the house her husband built for her, surrounded by a dense forest and a lake.  We already know she's in trouble, because the only reason a forest and a lake exist in a thriller is so that ghostly images or a dead body can show up later on.  Sure enough, both do.  That comes with the territory.  What I did not believe is that the only people in Beth's life seem to be the kindly old neighbor (Vondie Curtis-Hall) who might know more about what's going on than he appears, and a friend from work named Claire (Sarah Goldberg), who pays her a visit once in a while.  Does she really have no friends, or other family she could be turning to in order to help with her grief over her husband's suicide?  Apparently, Owen had absolutely no family or friends either, as none ever show up.  We see someone delivering some food to Beth in the film's opening scene, but they are never seen again, and it's the only time someone outside of Claire seems to be willing to check in to see if she's doing okay.

She's not, obviously.  After obsessively watching old wedding videos and scrolling through photos on his phone, she starts seeing pictures of women she does not recognize, but strangely look similar to her.  This is enough to arouse her suspicions that maybe her husband was not who she thought he was.  Then the paranormal activity kicks in around the house, with the knocking  on the walls, music on the stereo turning on at odd hours of the night, and ghostly images that she starts seeing around the lake and the boat where Owen took his own life not long ago.  Are these ghostly visions trying to tell her something?  Is Owen himself now haunting the home, or is it something else?  To say anymore would be spoiling, but I do want to ask this question to anyone who sees the movie.  If you discovered a certain secret about a loved one that Beth learns, I think most sane people would call the authorities.  Instead, she decides to go home, leave a cryptic voicemail on Claire's phone, and take a shower.  Not once does calling the police ever seem to cross her mind.

I felt plenty of goodwill toward The Night House as it started to unfold.  Rebecca Hall delivers a strong performance as a woman who seems to have her reality shattered by the things she learns, and is clinging to whatever feelings she used to have.  And director David Bruckner gives the film a handsome look, along with the help of cinematographer Elisha Christian.  But the script and the plot never truly came to life to me.  There are some individually good scenes throughout, but the story as a whole never clicked.  After a while, the movie starts to repeat itself.  Beth wanders the house, learns something, has a vision, wanders, learns, vision...I kept on waiting for it to surprise me, and it never did.  As for the final revelation, it somehow all leads up to a final scene that manages both to fly off the rails, and be anticlimactic at the same time.  

As I'm writing this, the movie is sitting at a solid 85% over on Rotten Tomatoes, so this might be one of those times when I'm in the minority.  All I know is that to me, the film felt like a long drive to nowhere in particular. 

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