Review: THE NIGHT HOUSE

Beth is grieving for her husband after his suicide. It might be the drinking she's doing to cope or something weird and malevolent but she is hearing the sounds of someone else in her isolated home at night. Going through his things she finds a photo of a woman who might be her but is dressed in clothes she doesn't have. One night, there is a deliberate blurring between dreams and reality for passages of this film, she sees a house identical to hers across the lake. The lights are on. She goes to investigate.

What she finds and how she responds constitute spoilers so that's it for plot in this review. What I can say is that the theme of grief for a suicide is explored to a degree impressive for a movie that doesn't present itself as being more than a horror tale. The kind of questions that pile up over the sense of loss are aired very clearly here and the note he leaves holds pity as well as terror.

Rebecca Hall has to carry this and it is her performance that guides us through a series of increasingly dark revelations as the situation intensifies and then breaks. She shows us a woman brittle from sudden and baffling loss, gripping her personal power lest it should explode. She gives us solid and clear intellect and which way the fight or flight might take her. It's an impressive performance. It's a performance that is too good for this film.

The Night House is a good notion for a film. Genre cinema has been an effective channel for the examination of any issue imaginable as it can pack notions into a monster or a phenomenon with great density and still be comprehensible and simply entertaining. The problems start when one or more of those features gets diproportionate treatment. So, while the production values are high and performances easily watchable the writing of this film allows such gormless repetition of information in the first two acts that the third act with all the dark and violence that you'd expect is robbed of momentum. We know Beth is angry. We know she has questions about her husband that might lead to profoundly affecting revelations. We just need to get on with it. This film is just over ten minutes shy of two hours and it is at least thirty minutes too long. If the plodding is intended as plumbing it fails and it is all Hall can do to keep it from implosion.

That's a pity as this is a story with something to say. There are moments where it promises to lift itself into real power. There's a technique of suggesting a human shape on screen which a second look dissipates. It's sleight of hand by CGI and it works a treat. Just a little more of that quality of vision and practice and an eye on the running time would have made this an exemplary horror film rather than the slowly drying wallpaper it turned out to be.