House of Darkness

Neil LaBute's latest feature film is an interminable exercise in uncomfortableness, as a man thinks he's headed for a hookup but stumbles into a stale Gothic horror story.

Another month, another Neil LaBute movie.

It was just two weeks ago that I reviewed “Out of the Blue,” a film noir written and directed by LaBute (“In the Company of Men”). It’s rare for any filmmaker to have two features come out so close together, let alone a not-particularly-prolific one who’s mostly worked in television the last decade.

He’s back again with the erotic Gothic horror, “House of Darkness” — and if you can believe it, might still have another movie debut in 2022.

I called “Blue” a flaccid reboot of other, better movies; surely, LaBute couldn’t have another stinker so soon on the heels of the last one?

He could.

“House” is billed as a seductive thriller about a man and a woman who come back to her house, an extravagant, isolated mansion, after an evening of drinks. She invites him in, they flirt, and kiss, and reasonable expectations about what will happen next come to bear.

The movie, 86 minutes long, is largely an interminable exercise in uncomfortableness, leading to a stale horror ending that even a simpleton could see coming after the first six minutes. It’s never good for the audience to always feel several steps ahead of the filmmakers, so they’re just waiting around for the movie to arrive.

Justin Long and Kate Bosworth play the couple, who have just met, and don’t even reveal their names until more than a third of the way through the movie — Hap and Mina, respectively. He’s a businessman at a vague financial advisor company, still dressed in his coat-and-tie uniform, while she is a mysterious presence in an alluring white dress that seems designed from a bygone age.

Hap has driven Mina home from the bar where they met, at her request, and she further invites him to come inside for a drink. Mina is focused, self-confident and direct. She makes as clear as day that she would like a tryst with him. At every step of their encounter, she’s the one calling the shots.

Her house is a huge gated place, the sort where hedge fund tycoons hide themselves away. Hap accurately describes it as a castle. Though the power’s a little blinky, and Mina lights a fire and candles to give them some illumination and warmth. They get drinks and canoodle on the couch.

Hap isn’t a bad guy, at least in his own mind, but he’s not terribly bright and certainly is a master at misreading cues. He tries to laugh away the uncomfortableness and get straight to the sex, but Mina keeps misdirecting him this way and that, teasing and toying with him. While she’s getting drinks, he unwisely makes a phone call to a buddy at the bar they just left, bragging about his good fortune of being picked up by a beautiful, rich woman — gosh, do you think Mina might overhear??

Their conversation is a repetition on a theme. Mina will flirt with Hap and seem to invite him in, then make some sort of passive-aggressive comment — about his tendency to fib, or suggesting that he could overpower her and do whatever he wants — until he starts to question her motives, she turns his questions back around at him, he smooths it over with more nervous laughter, and then the circle restarts.

I don’t want to give too much away, other than other figures will emerge including Lucy (Gia Crovatin) and Nora (Lucy Walters), who have their own pieces of the tale to tell.

“House of Darkness” is essentially an (overly) extended mind game. As often is the case with LaBute, the push/pull interaction between men and women is at the center. Hap thinks he’s the aggressor but really he’s the quarry. Any person with half a brain in that situation, or in the audience, can figure that out the moment he steps across the threshold.

The movie tries to draw out the tension, but we quickly grow bored, particularly of Hap’s whiny shtick, and want the story to get to the point it’s been laboriously aiming at for the last hour.

Really, this story would work better if it were much, much shorter. I could see it as a 30-minute portion of a horror anthology film — something Hollywood doesn’t really do anymore, but should.