The Night House: Rebecca Hall mesmerizes in one of the scariest films of the year – Fantasia 2021 review

We rarely get films like The Night House anymore. A decidedly adult horror-thriller centered on grief as opposed to the usual slog of horror franchise entries that Hollywood loves to pump out every year, The Night House is an emotional and transfixing experience centered by an incredible performance from Rebecca Hall.

Hall plays Beth, a schoolteacher grieving for the loss of her husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) who took his own life at the couple’s lakehouse. Beth tries to maintain a semblance of her life by keeping her job and going out for drinks with her co-workers including her supportive close friend Claire (Barry‘s Sarah Goldberg) but she is close to the breaking point. That pressure eventually boils over when Beth begins experiencing strange phenomena in the lakehouse. All of the traditional paranormal signs are there; she hears voices, sees writing on the walls, and even receives a phone call from Owen’s cell phone.

While going through Owen’s things, Beth discovers floor plans for a strange version of the lakehouse Owen built for them, with frightening notes scribbled throughout the drawings. She also begins sleepwalking, following the voices outside of her home, and exploring the surrounding forest in the middle of the night, a practice her kind and worried neighbor Mel (Vondie Curtis-Hall) tries to discourage.

After confronting Mel, he reluctantly reveals that he also saw Owen wandering through the same woods not long before he took his own life. Owen was with a woman who looked just like Beth, so much so that Mel at first assumed it was her. The revelation sends the already emotionally fragile Beth on a tailspin; was Owen having an affair? And what is this other house that suddenly appears in her visions across from the lake that looks like a mirror image of her own?

Written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski (the team behind the great coming-of-age thriller Super Dark Times) The Night House is a tense and frightening vision of grief, mixed with enough tinges of the occult to keep the horror hounds on their toes. The layers of what’s haunting Beth keep being pulled back to reveal something even more insidious and sinister (no pun intended), before culminating in a transfixing and heartbreaking finale that is as beautiful as it is perplexing.

Director David Bruckner (The Signal) knows what audiences expect from a haunted house film, and he seems to revel in subverting audience expectations throughout the film. His camera lingers on Beth’s tear-streaked face for often uncomfortable lengths of time, and the expert use of music with that up-close framing leads to one of the most effective jump scares in years.

While The Night House features some familiar ghost story tropes and filmmaking techniques, it takes enough detours into the truly weird to give it a unique and memorable spin (let’s just say Bruckner’s choice to helm the next Hellraiser movie makes perfect sense). With a searing and riveting performance from Rebecca Hall at its core, The Night House is a thrilling and tightly constructed mainstream horror film for adults. Bruckner seems to have evaded a heap of studio notes to dumb it down and delivered a rare jewel of a film that operates on its own terms and with its own twisted logic, a refreshing change of pace in this dreary summer blockbuster season.

The Night House is in theaters now.