Post by Dracula on Sept 26, 2021 19:11:02 GMT -5
The Night House(8/26/2021)
I didn’t know much of what to expect from The Night House; I didn’t remember seeing a single trailer, there wasn’t much buzz for it leading up to its release, and while it had a very strong Rotten Tomatoes score it wasn’t really a movie critics were going too far out of their way to champion, which is a shame because it’s a very solid horror movie. The film is essentially a combination of the two most recent trends in horror cinema: the haunted house movies and the moody “elevated” horror rooted in trauma. The film follows a woman living in a lakeside home that her husband had built for the two of them but who killed himself shortly before the start of the film. The woman is grieving this loss but starts to suspect that this husband may have been leading a double life and also that there’s something odd going on in the house. I’ll stop the description there before I go into spoiler territory. If there’s a problem with the film it’s familiarity. On a basic plot level this is a somewhat unique riff on the haunted house film, but not a radical one, and on a thematic level its themes of manifested grief will be familiar to people who have been following “elevated” horror trends as of late. It is perhaps a bit ungrateful to suggest that the well is already dry on some of these themes and trends after less than five years, but it’s hard to deny that some of the impact has been diminished a bit. Still, this is a very well made (if not particularly scary) horror film with a strong performance at its center by Rebecca Hall that’s well worth a look.
***1/2 out of Five
I didn’t know much of what to expect from The Night House; I didn’t remember seeing a single trailer, there wasn’t much buzz for it leading up to its release, and while it had a very strong Rotten Tomatoes score it wasn’t really a movie critics were going too far out of their way to champion, which is a shame because it’s a very solid horror movie. The film is essentially a combination of the two most recent trends in horror cinema: the haunted house movies and the moody “elevated” horror rooted in trauma. The film follows a woman living in a lakeside home that her husband had built for the two of them but who killed himself shortly before the start of the film. The woman is grieving this loss but starts to suspect that this husband may have been leading a double life and also that there’s something odd going on in the house. I’ll stop the description there before I go into spoiler territory. If there’s a problem with the film it’s familiarity. On a basic plot level this is a somewhat unique riff on the haunted house film, but not a radical one, and on a thematic level its themes of manifested grief will be familiar to people who have been following “elevated” horror trends as of late. It is perhaps a bit ungrateful to suggest that the well is already dry on some of these themes and trends after less than five years, but it’s hard to deny that some of the impact has been diminished a bit. Still, this is a very well made (if not particularly scary) horror film with a strong performance at its center by Rebecca Hall that’s well worth a look.
***1/2 out of Five
