Review: THE BEACH HOUSE

Young couple, Emily and Randall, turn up at Randall's parents' beach house for a weekend away. The neighbourhood is deserted but they like it that way. Then, at one point a strange older woman appears in the house as though she owns the place. She, Jane, is soon joined by her husband, Mitch, who recognises Randall as his friend's son. Inconvenient but what can you do, the house is big enough for the four of them. They get acquainted at dinner and when the wine runs out Randall suggests some pot chocolate which everyone gets into. One enchanted evening later and everyone gets a little psychedelic, not least Jane who goes wandering into a garden of luminous watery pods hanging from the foliage. There's a weird smell and a rising fog. And that's before you get to the frilly pink jellyfish and the wormlike infections.

This film presents a kind of Lovecraftian eco horror in which either the ancient ones have come to reclaim the human empire of wastepackaging or alien ones. It matters little to the infected as their bodies get increasingly colonised. And it matters to us as an intriguing sci-horror plot unfolds in a setting that is sending the cinematographer into a natural ecstasy. Performances are decent all round. So what's missing? Once we establish the big bad and it has its wicked way things get stodgy in the plot and we get a lot of overdrawn sequences that should be short and sharp. I noticed the same with the unsatisfying recent Color Out of Space which went in circles in act two and only barely recovered. The crsip finale of The Beach House is brought down by this as it is allowed to come across as unimpressive.

That said you could do a lot worse on a warm spring night with a bottle of something to go with those oysters.


Available on Shudder.