The Night House

Rebecca Hall is phenomenal, as always, but this confused thriller struggles to reach her level.

More and more, I find myself feeling a distinct sense of admiration for the actor who can, time and time again, be better than the movie they’re in. To be able to consistently elevate even the blandest of films through unconventional, affecting choices is the sign of a truly singular performer. It’s an especially impressive trademark from those who aren’t regularly starring in the biggest, best, or most talked-about films of a given year.

In the last several years, Rebecca Hall has become one of the first actors to enter my mind whenever I think on “reliable powerhouse” actors. Since first noticing her in Iron Man 3 as a sort-of redemptive secondary villain (though she’s been killing it since at least the mid-to-late 2000s), I’ve seen Hall star in a number of thrillers and dramas, often taking perfunctory roles and turning them into something special to behold. Her lead performance in this weekend’s interesting-but-clunky thriller The Night House is no exception.

What we have in The Night House is, I suspect, a rather silly and confused script that is held up by strong direction from David Buckner (whose origins are in horror shorts, including chapters of anthologies Southbound and V/H/S), and even more impressive acting from Hall.

Schoolteacher Beth (Hall) has been recently widowed—not to mention utterly blindsided—by her husband Owen’s (Evan Jonigkeit) suicide. Mere hours after the funeral, she’s already not coping well, turning to booze and secluding herself from her friends, when she starts hearing bumps in the night and getting ominous texts from her dead hubby. It’s easy to dismiss these as dreams for awhile, especially when the texts are gone in the morning and her coworkers assure her that she’s just imagining things.

But when she starts going through Owen’s phone and finding pictures of other women (who look suspiciously like her), Beth can’t help but start climbing down the rabbit hole of “who was my husband really?” This suspicion, along with increasingly spooky night terrors, only affirms her belief that he might have been involved in some pretty insidious stuff, and could actually be reaching out to her beyond the grave.

It’s not exactly an original story from the outset, and that’s fine. Buckner’s clean, cold visual style amplifies the increasing loneliness and paranoia Beth is experiencing, which often distracts from the fairly expected proceedings of the story.

Likewise, Hall’s fluid cycling between a variety of modes keeps Beth feeling like a truly unique protagonist. In a single scene, she can come off as calloused, confident, unhinged, and vulnerable, without an ounce of tonal whiplash or perceived inconsistency of character—rather, it creates the opposite feeling: a truer sense of who Beth is, as a complicated, developed individual beyond this particular event in her life.

One effectively uncomfortable scene, in which Beth abruptly decides to confide in her coworkers how she’s dealing with Owen’s death, encapsulates Hall’s controlled volatility better than any other. While the scene feels a bit goofy when focused on her strangely-written coworkers—who clearly aren’t very close to Beth, yet for some reason brazenly ask invasive questions about the details of Owen’s death and her response to it—it finds its trajectory every time the camera cuts back to Hall. She’s equal parts deadpan to the emotional weight of her husband’s death, and unapologetically frank about how much she’s suffering. As she flips between these emotions, stunning her coworkers with her honesty and conspiracy-level suspicions, Hall never breaks stride, nor do any of Beth’s responses to her peers feel out of place.

This phenomenon is a consistent element of how Hall choose to characterize Beth in her various interactions with other characters throughout the story. She’s clearly dealt with a lot—even prior to her husband’s death, as we come to find out—and has no qualms expressing to people how she’s prepared to get the answers she needs. It’s just a downright fun performance to watch, and it pulls a lot of weight in suspending one’s disbelief at the sometimes cartoonishly illogical behaviors of some characters.

The simple mystery about what’s causing Beth’s increasingly horrifying premonitions also puts in a lot of work toward making Night House an engaging watch. Through the first two acts, putting the pieces together and trying to imagine where it’s all going actually had me wondering if this would become one of my favorites of the year. In hindsight, I suspect that much of that intrigue was dependent wholly on my curiosity about the eventual outcome, and that subsequent viewings would do little for me besides exacerbate a lot of the problems that have become apparent to me in my reflection since.

And that’s ultimately one of the biggest killers of Night House’s enigmatic appeal. Where it all goes, sadly, is not a particularly interesting or visceral culmination of the movie’s slow-burn mystery plotting, and, as a result, only highlights the contrivances of the film’s first two acts. While I appreciate the allegorical grief theming in the film’s final moments, the loud and boisterous climax that immediately precedes it feels jarringly detached from the concluding message. Why—if this is all a stirring metaphor about

[**SPOILERS, MAYBE??**]

the acceptance of death and what comes after—am I watching Beth get violently dragged around her house by an invisible paranormal entity at 60 miles an hour?

[[“spoilers” end here.]

Buckner ensures that the bombastic, studio-style climax is visually thrilling, but it all feels terribly spectacular for its more arthousey setup and its meditative, somber resolution. Additionally, while those quiet closing moments are effective, they seem to brush off some seriously concerning real-world consequences of the events that unfolded prior to the finale.

All told, Hall is incredible in every shot she gets, and it’s practically worth watching The Night House for her vibrant performance alone. Buckner also shows a lot of strengths as a storyteller, but he could benefit from finding better stories to tell. I’d love to see these two work together again, even within this genre, but next time, maybe decide whether it’s more “creepy but melancholy allegory” or “crowd-pleasing thriller” beforehand.