LM23 Rating: Rebecca Hall deserves to be in an actual scary movie
Lately I’ve been trying to find random scary movies on Disney+ and Prime Video. I said it once and I’ll say it again, but these streaming services need to fire the people who are in charge of the onsite search engines and get new ones. Whoever does the search engines for Google or retail shopping sites, get those people. I’m already overwhelmed by way too many choices, and images are great, but none of its text seems to be searchable. Can I just see a text listing of all of the movie names in alphabetical order by their actual categories???
Anyway…a YouTube commercial for Disney+ was actually useful. In that commercial, there was a snippet of The Night House, so I thought I’d check it out.
The movie begins very promising. We’re quickly introduced to a grieving but angry widow named Beth. She’s a high school teacher who is left all alone in a huge modern lake house after her husband Owen’s inexplicable suicide. Of course all scary movies that involve a house have to be located by a body of water or in the middle of the country. It wouldn’t be as scary if she were in a mansion in Calabasas or surrounded by other wealthy people in a high rise on Fifth Avenue. The house is made for ghosts and goblins as its built with lots of windows with no apparent window coverings. Perfect for scary shadows and figures to peek through. And for extra spookiness, the house was built by her now dead husband.
It seems like we’re in for a modern day scary movie like The Conjuring series when we see that Beth isn’t a weak, weepy, widow looking for someone to save her. She dutifully shows up to the last day of school to deal with an annoying helicopter parent who wants to fight a bad grade for her probably mediocre academic son. It reminded me of when I was in high school and these parents of a mediocre student showed up at our English Honors class to complain on behalf of their daughter about how the teacher was giving too much homework which was I guess causing their daughter to perform poorly. I don’t know what they expected from an Honors or advanced class, but I always found them to give excessive homework to prepare you for when you work in corporate and are forced to do excessive work for no overtime pay.
I guess they thought it was “excessive” that we were forced to plow through novels in 50-page increments and be tested within a week of completion of the novel. I didn’t think it was excessive, but then again I wasn’t a mediocre academic. I was one of the top students and got straight A’s. I scored a 92% on my English final and received an academic scholarship for post secondary school thanks to the rigorous work we were given. I was also well prepared for English and History classes in university as I was forced to read multiple books within a week of being assigned them. But excuses, excuses for these helicopter parents and their mediocre kids I guess…
Beth the teacher doesn’t give a crap about what grade this kid gets, so she offers up whatever grade would be deemed suitable for the parent. The parent is mortified when she learns that the reason why Beth wasn’t available initially to talk with the mediocre student was that her husband blew his brains out.
With school finished, Beth now has a lot of time at home alone. She seemingly falls asleep in one place and then wakes up in another. She also has very strange nightmares and experiences weird things. Who else isn’t freaked out when loud music suddenly starts to play? As the strange occurrences start to build and build, you then start to expect some secrets to be revealed. Why did Owen kill himself? Why does the music suddenly start to play on full blast?
There are also some bizarre scenes that we don’t know if they’re from Beth’s dreams or they’re ghostly apparitions, but there’s even a part where Beth is outside and comes across three young women who run by her and jump into the lake. Beth follows them in a rowboat that is similar to the one Owen killed himself in and she ends up on the other side which also happens to have a house there. She sees what looks like her husband involved with a woman who at first looks like her from afar, but it is not. She goes into the house and scary parallel universe things happen similar to what we have seen in The Grudge.
I’ll admit that I was getting bored and so I can’t remember when it was when Beth again randomly stumbles upon what looks like an encampment or site of what may be a new house being built. But she miraculously finds dead bodies wrapped in plastic bags hidden in this encampment. She freaks out and runs home. We again don’t know if it’s because she was dreaming or if it was real.
Another bizarre trend we keep seeing is Beth will look out at a window or somewhere behind her in the house and it looks like the shape of a person, but if we look closer, it’s just an illusion of the door or window frame. After a while, you’re like okay, is the scary ghost in this house? The house across the lake? Inside the scary encampment? Like is there even a scary ghost or is Beth having a mental breakdown and all of this is just a figment of her imagination? With so many wannabe scary movies that want to be smart scary movies, there’s too much time wasted on too many “smart” scary scenes. It’s like, okay, we get it, something is happening, but why???
Beth all this time is convinced that the strange happenings are due to her husband’s ghost or presence. She goes through his phone and computer and is able to find hundreds of images of women who look like her, but they aren’t her. One is of a side profile of a woman in a bookstore who looks like her, but we don’t know for sure because the face is turned from the camera. Beth shows it to her fellow teacher friend who says it’s of course her. But Beth claims that she doesn’t own a sweater like the one the woman. Beth’s detective skills of how to find photos stored on a Mac laptop pay off when she finds photos of the woman in the bookstore, but with her face exposed. Beth then randomly goes into what looks like Owen’s office and amongst millions of random moving boxes, opens one in which books about the occult are found and there’s even stamps on the books of where the books were sold. I don’t remember buying books from a store that are stamped with the store’s address, but sure.
Of course, Beth comes across the woman who is in the photo and learns that of course her husband had an entanglement with this woman. Despite not knowing who Beth is, this woman still decides to drive to Beth’s house one day to tell her the entire truth of her relationship with Owen. She claims she never slept with her, but at one point Owen was violent with her, but didn’t hurt her.
This is where the film starts to deteriorate. It’s like, is this movie about Owen’s evil apparition or is it just the paranoia of a distraught widow? We think there is a real ghost in the house as Beth at one point starts to make out with a spirit who she thinks is Owen. We don’t see anything except for movement along Beth’s arms that is probably due to an unseen ghost. We’re supposed to freak out when Beth asks if this is Owen and the ghost says it is not Owen.
At this point, the movie is way long down its path of Owen having a secret life where he carried on secret affairs and he may have murdered those women found in the encampment. That would’ve been find with me. But now it’s like who is this ghost, then?
The biggest problem with The Night House, besides its very generic name, is that there’s no background and investigation into who this real evil spirit is and why is it trying to kill Beth. All we hear about this ghost guy is when Beth is out drinking with her teacher friends and mentions nonchalantly that when she was in school or whatever, she almost died. Okay, that’s very tragic, but a lot of people have near death experiences with road accidents or home accidents or whatever. But I don’t think it’s because a ghost like in Final Destination is out to get her.
But that’s the smart scary movie pay off. Owen is not a philandering, murdering husband. He was trying to save his wife by “tricking” the ghost that he “murdered” Beth by deliberately going out with these lookalikes and killing them. But ultimately, Owen’s plan didn’t work out as he killed himself. There’s also a confusing smart scary twist about the house across the lake was the “opposite house” that Owen used to trick the ghost. This house is supposed to be a replica of their house, so the ghost would think that Beth was in that house.
The movie probably would’ve been scary if Owen was alive and we’re all in on the ghost looking to kill Beth from back in her student days. The real scary part would be discovering who this apparition is and why it wants to kill Beth. What happened in that car accident? What did Beth mean when she said she actually died that day? Did she meet with that evil spirit? How did it follow her all these years? Now that would’ve been a better scary movie rather than another one of those oh the husband was a cheat and lived a double life. But wait, gotcha, he did it to prevent the ghost from killing his wife.
Despite the lame story, Rebecca Hall gives an award worthy performance. We feel her fear and torture of being toyed by the spirit. She doesn’t let up even though the movie is clearly beneath her. Vondie Curtis-Hall is also a strong support as the neighbor who’s trying to look out for her. But he’s wasted as a background character and not really part of the plot.
So skip this movie and just watch The Grudge and The Conjuring.
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