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The always great Rebecca Hall anchors the effective “The Night House,” an old-fashioned ghost story that reveals unimaginable truths after a shocking loss. Owing more to films like “Carnival of Souls” and “ The Innocents ” than most recent genre fare, it’s a very impressive mood generator, the kind of movie that wants you to be unsettled from very nearly its first frame all the way through its final one, and it mostly gets that job done. In terms of sheer craft, it’s the best work yet from David Bruckner (“ The Ritual ”) as he precisely slides his camera through the increasingly discomfiting life of a woman who is learning that she may actually be safer now with her husband haunting than she was living in the same house as him. With top-notch sound design to truly amplify the experience, this is a must-see for horror fans, one of the better genre pics of 2021.

Beth (Hall) has been struck numb with the sudden trauma of grief, and it’s the kind of grief that comes with a side of anger, as she’s furious at her husband Owen ( Evan Jonigkeit ) for taking the boat out one morning and shooting himself in the head. He reportedly showed no signs of depression—as she says at one point, that was her thing—and Beth is just expected to keep unpacking at their lake house and going about her daily life as a teacher. As she opens boxes, she discovers some unusual possessions by Owen, including some books that appear to be about the occult and dark arts, complete with notes in the margin by her dead husband. What was he into?

At the same time, Beth keeps having intensifying nightmares. They typically take place in the lake house where she now resides alone, and they seem to be leading her places, including to another “mirror house” across the lake, and down to where Owen kept his darkest secrets. Why is she being shown these things? Hall deftly conveys a blend of anger, grief, and confusion that captures what it’s like to be left behind by suicide, wherein questions can never have concrete answers and loved ones naturally feel hurt by the decision to be left behind. She is a remarkable performer, doing some of her best work here in a part that requires a wide range of emotion. So many other actresses would have let the haunting do the work, but Hall knows that a film like this doesn’t connect without true, character-driven feelings at the center. It’s a performance that reminded me of Nicole Kidman in “ The Others ” or Toni Collette in “ Hereditary ”—two other turns wherein if they don’t commit 100%, the entire suspension of disbelief collapses.

The script by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski  forces Beth to be as much of an investigator as a survivor. When someone dies at their own hand, people have a habit of saying that they must have been hiding something, and it feels like the writers started with that idea. What was Owen keeping from his wife and friends? Without spoiling anything, it was a lot . Even Owen’s dark secrets change shape over the course of this story. At first, it feels like it will be a simple tale of a widow discovering her husband’s secret life, especially after Beth finds a photo of another woman ( Stacy Martin ) on his phone. There’s more to it than that. Almost too much more. The final revelations of “The Night House” can be a bit difficult to unpack and connect back to the bulk of the film—I even had to email a colleague who asked me to try and explain the plot after the screening. I'm pretty sure that I get it, but I’m not fully convinced everything lines up.

This is not that harsh a criticism. Ghost stories should have a few gray areas and a few dots that don’t connect to one another. And “The Night House” works best when it’s not even trying to make sense, when we’re not sure if we’re awake or in a dream, if Beth is being warned or hunted by her visions. The sounds that go bump in the night, the wet footprints on a dock when no one else should be there, the writing in the fog on a shower mirror—these beats are brilliantly handled by Bruckner and Hall, who understand that uncertainty is the scariest state of being. Especially at night.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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The Night House (2021)

Rated R for some violence/disturbing images, and language including some sexual references.

107 minutes

Rebecca Hall as Beth

Sarah Goldberg as Claire

Vondie Curtis-Hall as Mel

Evan Jonigkeit as Owen

Stacy Martin as Madelyne

• David Bruckner
• Ben Collins
• Luke Piotrowski

Cinematographer

• Elisha Christian
• David Marks

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‘The Night House’ Review: Mourning Becomes Her

A sensational Rebecca Hall plays a grieving widow besieged by potentially occult forces in this superior creepout.

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

The scares land like blows and the eeriness is pervasive in “The Night House,” David Bruckner’s hyper-focused, unnervingly sure follow-up to his 2018 wilderness frightener, “The Ritual.”

Fully owning every one of her scenes, Rebecca Hall plays Beth, a New York schoolteacher whose husband of 14 years, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit), has just taken his own life. Now Beth wanders around the modernist lakeshore home Owen built, guzzling brandy and tortured by the mystery of his death. The only darkness in their marriage, she confesses to her best friend (Sarah Goldberg) and co-workers, was hers, the result of a traumatic experience years before.

From among Owen’s things, baffling clues emerge. A creepy suicide note; architectural drawings that appear to reverse the layout of their home; pictures of strange women on his phone, all resembling Beth. Petrifying sights and sounds haunt her nights and inchoate shadows hover around her. A kind neighbor (Vondie Curtis-Hall) tries to help, but it’s clear he can’t see the bloody footprints straggling from the couple’s rowboat and heading toward the house.

As the screenplay teases natural explanations for these sinister goings-on — Extreme grief? Nightmares? Mental illness? — Bruckner maintains a death grip on the film’s mood while his cinematographer, Elisha Christian, turns the home’s reflective surfaces into shape-shifting puzzle pieces. The ending is the least daring of the possible options; but Hall is spectacular, flinty and fraying in a role that leaves her often alone and, in one chilling scene, requires her to contort in disquieting ways. As Beth’s skin undulates to an unseen touch and her throat arcs alarmingly backward, Hall shows us a woman for whom terror and desire have become one.

The Night House Rated R for buried bodies and bumps in the night. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters.

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‘the night house’: film review.

Rebecca Hall stars as a widow who digs into the dark secrets of her recently deceased husband and the lakeside home he built for them in David Bruckner's supernatural mystery.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Rebecca Hall ’s admirable refusal to soften the brittle edges of her recently widowed protagonist in The Night House makes her a compelling variation on the usual woman in ghostly peril. David Bruckner’s supernatural horror about the mysteries she uncovers after her husband’s suicide has stylish craftsmanship, good performances, a nerve-rattling soundscape and some of the most terrifyingly assaultive audio jump scares in recent memory. All that makes it highly watchable, even if the occult elements of Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski’s screenplay, about decoys and deceptions deployed against malevolent possession, don’t quite come together in a satisfying resolution.

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There are enough strengths in this Searchlight pickup out of the Sundance Midnight section to make it of interest to consumers of sophisticated horror, notably the rewards of watching Hall hurl herself full-tilt into the role of a woman both scared out of her wits and fiercely determined to get to the truth. But the film suffers by comparison with recent entries like The Invisible Man , which had a similarly creepy take on murky marital secrets but backed its brooding atmospherics with sharper storytelling.

The Night House

Release date : Friday, Aug. 20 Cast : Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Vondie Curtis Hall, Evan Jonigkeit, Stacy Martin, David Abeles, Christina Jackson Director : David Bruckner Screenwriters : Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski

Hall plays high school teacher Beth, still in shock after the death of her architect husband, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit), and now faced with the emptiness of the dream home he designed for them, a modernist jewel in New York’s Finger Lakes region. Nestled in a pine forest overlooking a tranquil body of water, the semi-isolated house has floor-to-ceiling windows, sleek wood surfaces and a steep zigzag of stairs down to a private boat dock, making it an ideal setting for a haunting.

As she knocks back brandy and spends her nights rewatching their wedding video from 14 years earlier, Beth struggles to comprehend what made Owen take their rowboat onto the lake and blow his brains out with a gun she wasn’t even aware they owned. Did she know him at all? As she explains to her concerned co-worker friend Claire (Sarah Goldberg, excellent), she was the one prone to depression, while Owen generally kept it together. His cryptic suicide note appears to provide few clues.

Beth starts hearing loud noises that disturb her sleep, and she senses a presence in the house. She also finds the gate to the boat dock open and muddy footprints leading down the stairs, though her friendly neighbor Mel (Vondie Curtis-Hall) assures her he hasn’t been near it. The bumps in the night grow more startling when the stereo starts coming on at full volume playing “their song,” and random texts arrive from Owen’s phone. But Beth wakes disoriented on the floor each morning, unsure if what she experienced was real or a dream.

Ignoring Claire’s advice, she starts looking through Owen’s phone and his papers, discovering evidence that suggests he was leading a double life, including images of women who resemble her. She also learns he was dabbling in occult reading, studying the dark magic of mazes and reversed spaces. This leads her back to a specialist bookstore in Utica where she meets Madeline (Stacy Martin), one of half a dozen woman photographed on Owen’s phone.

The script by Collins and Piotrowski capably plants the seeds of banal infidelity while slowly revealing a much more insidious picture of what was really chipping away at the sanctity of Beth and Owen’s marriage and the steps he was taking to thwart that destruction. The darkness has its roots in Beth’s near-death experience in a Tennessee auto accident when she was in high school, and the mystery includes the discovery of a second house across the lake, a duplicate of the couple’s home in which the details are slightly off, just as the women resembling Beth are not quite her doppelgangers.

There are interesting twists on the standard haunting narrative here, but the writing is too muddled to clarify them, instead veering into chaotic mayhem as Beth faces down the sinister forces that plagued her husband in a violent denouement.

That the movie remains gripping despite the vagaries of its plotting is due largely to Hall’s tough characterization and the embodiment of countless shades of grief in Beth, who’s simultaneously terrified and enraged by the otherworldly violation of her home and her marriage. She’s in pain, but she’s pissed, too.

There’s also much to admire in the cinematography of Elisha Christian, who revealed his grasp of the expressive power of architecture in Kogonada’s Columbus . The conjuring of spectral presences out of structural beams and negative space — which may or may not be products of Beth’s feverish imagination — is especially effective. Likewise Ben Lovett’s obsessively churning score. Bruckner, who directed Netflix’s The Ritual and segments of the anthology films V/H/S and Southbound — he’s now in production on a reboot of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser for Hulu, also with writers Collins and Piotrowski — deftly sustains tension and mood. It’s just a shame this absorbing chiller, which unfolds primarily in the thick of night, doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny in the daylight.

Full credits

Distributor: Searchlight Pictures Production companies: Searchlight Pictures, Anton Capital, TSG Entertainment, Phantom Four Films Cast: Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Vondie Curtis Hall, Evan Jonigkeit, Stacy Martin, David Abeles, Christina Jackson Director: David Bruckner Screenwriters: Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski Producers: David Goyer, Keith Levine, John Zois Executive producers: Sébastien Raybaud, François Callens, Laura Wilson, Rebecca Hall, David Bruckner, George Paaswell, Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski Director of photography: Elisha Christian Production designer: Kathrin Eder Costume designer: Samantha Hawkins Music: Ben Lovett Editor: David Marks Casting: Eric Souliere

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The Night House review: Indoor horror with real atmosphere

There's a certain "Hotel California"-ness to most house horror that can get a little exhausting. If they can check out anytime they like, why do these hapless, terrorized characters never leave? (Or for the love of Airbnb, just take a long weekend.) Director David Bruckner 's uncanny mood piece The Night House (in theaters Friday) at least gives its heartbroken protagonist, Beth ( Rebecca Hall ), a compelling reason to stay: The bucolic upstate lake home that most of the movie takes place in was built by her late architect husband, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit). They were happy there, and it's hardly been a week since he inexplicably took his own life in the little rowboat bobbing out front.

It's also soon clear that he has not — judging by the things that bump and go bloody in the night — entirely vacated the premises. Rust-colored footsteps scatter down the dock; urgent all-caps text messages materialize and disappear like a Magic 8 Ball; the couple's wedding song (Richard and Linda Thompson's haunted waltz "The Calvary Cross" ) continuously cues up of its own accord, a macabre playlist made for one.

While her well-meaning neighbor (Vondie Curtis-Hall) and best friend ( The Report 's Sarah Goldberg) do what they can to be supportive, everyone presumes it's just part of the mourning process. But Beth, a smart, pragmatic high school teacher, had her own unsettling brush with mortality as a teenager, and she's too overwhelmed by mounting evidence not to believe that there's something about Owen's death that won't rest.

Though the bag of tricks that Bruckner ( V/H/S , The Ritual ) digs through — the jump scares and shadow figures, the eerily suspended rules of gravity and physics — are familiar, he uses them to build a kind of clanging, feverish atmosphere. And British actress Hall ( The Gift , Godzilla vs. Kong ), tasked with carrying nearly every scene, grounds her performance in more than meat-puppet panic; her unraveling springs from genuine, furious grief. Though its final scenes don't stick the landing, devolving into a muddle of grisly discoveries and half-baked mythology, the movie's stylized dread lingers, a doorway to an upside-down world whose stakes stay (nearly) real enough to make us care. Grade: B

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The Night House Reviews

A creepy, tension filled, dark descent that gets darker and darker the more you dive into the story. Rebecca Hall gives one of her best performances & David Bruckner directs the hell out of this

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

What's more terrifying — to have someone you love abruptly snatched away from you? Or to discover you're safer with them gone? Both revelations are crushing, and the film does a fine job laying the groundwork and leaving viewers to decide for themselves.

Full Review | Dec 13, 2022

The film works best when it is a straight up haunted house movie. When the third act takes a violent swerve into psychological thriller, What Lies Beneath-territory... the rock-solid performance of Hall will keep you invested.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 12, 2022

A film about picking up the pieces after your life has been completely shattered, The Night House is horror that cuts to the very soul through a devastating performance by Rebecca Hall.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 23, 2022

A warning to all who enter The Night House: this isn’t the film to watch before bed.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Sep 22, 2022

Director David Bruckner's spine-tingling horror film is a chilling meditation on grief and depression that never gives easy answers to these questions.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | May 20, 2022

The Night House might not stick the landing, but it's an eerie supernatural chiller with an incredible lead performance from Rebecca Hall.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 28, 2022

Note to Ari Aster: this is how you make a horror movie about depression and suicidal ideation.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Feb 28, 2022

The Night House creates an immersive and spooky mood that works in spite of some dissatisfying explanations in the last third.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 12, 2022

The Night House is emotionally intelligent, sufficiently unnerving, and thoroughly eerie.

Full Review | Feb 12, 2022

The idea that Hall should be the lead of more movies isn't new, but The Night House solidifies it as objective fact.

Full Review | Jan 5, 2022

The Night House is lucky to have Rebecca Hall.

Full Review | Nov 29, 2021

It's a rare treat as an adult horror fan to be properly scared in a film and The Night House gave me that sweet, sweet high, making my blood run cold more than once.

Full Review | Nov 16, 2021

It's directed with elegance and delves into psychological horror. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Nov 3, 2021

The Night House is the quickest way to spend nearly two hours, maintaining maximum tension and dread from minute one.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 31, 2021

Interesting art direction and kind of spooky.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Oct 28, 2021

This rather simple story is bent into a pretzel by Bruckner.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 25, 2021

... The Night House takes the cognitive confusion of loss and grief and gives it a thriller spin, creating a tale that will have you question what it is you see and wondering what you don't see, even as you recline in a place of comfort.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 19, 2021

A restless exercise that never really gets under the skin but gets us minimally interested throughout.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 15, 2021

Well directed and with a remarkable performance by Rebeca Hall. Not even the inconsistent ending manages to sink the film.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Oct 12, 2021

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The Night House review – Rebecca Hall anchors spooky horror

An electrifying performance lifts an often effective yet muddled film about a woman investigating her husband’s suicide

W hen someone you love kills themselves, a strange and specifically unbearable form of grief takes hold. There’s the base-level sadness that comes after any death, impossible enough on its own, but it’s then swirled together with a jolting shock, a confusing anger and, worst of all, a haunting curiosity. There are unthinkably difficult questions that linger, questions that will most likely never be answered, a cruelly unsatiated hunger for a truth that will forever be a mystery.

In The Signal director David Bruckner’s rattling new film The Night House, which premiered back at Sundance in 2020, that particularly gnawing affliction seeps into the life of teacher Beth (Rebecca Hall) after her husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) takes a boat out on the lake and shoots himself (with a gun she didn’t even know he owned). An inevitable unravelling follows as Beth pieces together the mess he left behind, from his maddening riddle of a note (“You were right, there is nothing, nothing is after you”) to a secret life being lived right under her nose. Who was she really married to and why does it feel like he hasn’t fully left?

The Night House is a film of unfolding duality, both in what it’s telling and how it’s told. Beth’s desperate search for something, anything that might shed light on this crippling darkness that has burrowed its way into her mind, leads her to find out about a second life and a second home, a husband who was one thing to her and something very different to others. Answers come to her in the real world but also in something close to a dream and there’s a Hitchcockian double, played by Stacy Martin, who looks like a version of Beth. There’s a conveyor belt of tantalising reveals, reminiscent of 90s/00s thrillers such as Deceived, Double Jeopardy and What Lies Beneath, of a woman figuring out her husband isn’t quite as perfect as she had assumed. But the film disappointingly follows suit, the elegant, if formulaic, investigation of the first two thirds turning into something far more ambitious, and far less successful, in the final act.

Co-writers Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski deserves some points perhaps for the big swing, but it’s one that feels a little too indebted to the recent-ish rise in so-called “elevated horror”, a rather grossly dismissive way of describing a sub-genre of artful films that use fantastical elements to comment on more substantive issues (examples range from The Babadook to Hereditary to The Witch to Midsommar). In trying to make their film about something, in a way that goes from clumsily obvious to frustratingly opaque, our investment starts to wither. The entertainingly chin-stroking drip-drip reveal of information starts to pool into a spillage and it’s one that Bruckner isn’t able to effectively clean up. The specifics of what’s really going on are far sillier than the film would have you believe and told in a way that’s scrappier than Hall deserves. What truly keeps it all afloat though, even in its messier moments, is her never-better performance, grounding some of the schlock with an intense, unwavering command of the material and without resorting to histrionics, she’s incredibly effective in conveying the hollowing horror of grief. It’s top-tier stuff, a towering actor looking down on the less convincing film around her, and it made me wonder why she’s been so absent of late, save for a thankless role in Godzilla v Kong.

It’s also an undeniably impressive showcase for Bruckner, graduating to something far slicker and bigger than what we’ve seen from him before (his last film was patchy woodland horror The Ritual). He makes the most of the nooks and shadows of his sleek central house and its surroundings and orchestrates a number of brutally efficient jump scares, one of which will eject even the most hardened horror fan from their seat. It’ll be curious to see what he does with his Hellraiser remake next, the blur of effectively nightmarish, if increasingly nonsensical, images in this film’s finale suggesting he’ll handle it, at least visually, with aplomb.

There are enough crafty surprises buried within The Night House to just about outweigh the elements that don’t work quite as well, mainly because it’s all delivered with such fiery conviction by Hall. The house might be built on shaky foundations but its inhabitant is utterly unshakable.

The Night House is out in US and UK cinemas on 20 August

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The Night House puts big cosmic horror into a small haunted-house story

“We mourn a loss together, but we grieve alone.”

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We mourn a loss together, but we grieve alone. A horror film where despair and depression are threats as formidable as any boogeyman, The Night House opens at the point where mourning ends and grieving begins, watching as Beth (Rebecca Hall), a schoolteacher in upstate New York, returns from the funeral of her husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit). A concerned friend walks her to the door, tells Beth to call her anytime, hands her a casserole, then leaves without joining her inside. As the sun sets over the nearby lake, Beth pauses, dumps the casserole in the trash, then waits for night to come.

It may not be arriving alone. Beth finds her nights are made restless by more than just the loss of her husband. Strange noises wake her from sleep. What appear to be bloody footprints mark the dock leading up to the back door. One night, shades of Personal Shopper , she receives texts from Owen, but when she wakes up, the texts have vanished. It’s all extremely troubling. More troubling: Beth starts waking up away from her bed, with no memory of having moved from one place to another.

Written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski (the team behind the memorable 2017 film Super Dark Times ) and directed by David Bruckner (part of the crew responsible for The Signal and V/H/S ), The Night House is simultaneously a haunted-house story and a mystery. One striking early scene reveals the details of Owen’s death via a tense conversation between Beth and a student’s parent who’s trying to nudge Beth toward giving her son a higher grade, because after all, Beth was absent on the date she’d scheduled a make-up project. Beth replies with unmasked hostility, telling the parent that she was unavailable then because that was the day her husband rowed out to the middle of the lake and shot himself. And, no, she doesn’t know why.

As the film progresses, Beth starts to piece the story behind the suicide together, but each new detail only deepens the mystery. Owen was an architect who designed their house, but why do the blueprints contain other plans for a similar house? Why did their friendly widowed neighbor Mel (Vondie Curtis-Hall) not tell Beth he sometimes saw Owen walking the woods at night, at least once with another woman? Why does their library contain books on the occult? And who’s that woman in the photograph on Owen’s phone, with her head turned away from the camera? She could almost pass for Beth, if Beth didn’t know better.

As the clues mount, Bruckner doles out scares in mounting intensity, a template for haunted-house movies dating at least back to 1944’s The Uninvited . It’s skillfully executed enough to make The Night House worth a look on technical merit alone, turning every corner of a luxurious lake house into a site of deep dread. But what’s memorable is the film’s interest in exploring ideas deeper than how scary it might be to be unexpectedly alone and seemingly surrounded by malevolent specters. The title has a literal meaning within the film, one better left unspoiled, but it also suggests the loneliness of Beth’s newly empty home and the shadows that threaten to envelop her, shadows that might be formidable threats even without the questions raised by Owen’s shocking death.

Owen, Beth confesses to her friends, was their marriage’s optimist. She was the one prone to spiraling darkness. What is she supposed to do now? But while her friends care about her, they also grow uncomfortable and impatient the more she talks about her loss. They offer bromides, dismiss her concerns, and steer her away from probing into Owen’s death. This kind of loss makes it hard to know what to do, what advice to offer, and all of it rings hollow to Beth’s ears anyway. Her nighttime visitors, however, have no trouble making themselves heard.

Hall plays Beth as a difficult woman who doesn’t always invite sympathy, even in her hour of need. Her grief takes the form of anger and suspicion. She behaves in ways that push other people away. Even her best friend Claire (Sarah Goldberg) isn’t sure what to do, beyond remaining present and listening. The film weaves a study of what it means to discover you’ve built your life over an abyss into the fabric of a multiplex-friendly horror movie, but it wouldn’t work without Hall’s deft, complex performance. She plays Beth as a woman shocked by her loss, but the real horror lies in the way the secrets she unearths seem to encourage her most self-destructive tendencies. When everything that gives her life meaning disappears, it starts to look like confirmation that it all might be meaningless. Maybe it’s time to pour another brandy and let the darkness in.

A tension enters The Night House ’s home stretch as the demands of the genre start to eat away at the ambiguity — at least up to a point. The film fully reveals what Owen was up to prior to his death, but what accompanies that revelation, particularly its connection to Beth’s past, can be read a couple of different ways, and the film smartly refuses to tell viewers what to think. Though the final moments are sure to frustrate viewers uncomfortable with unanswered questions, the grayness suits the subject. Sometimes it isn’t just the houses that are haunted, the people within their walls are too. Some ghosts can’t easily be pushed out or explained away. Some of them, we have to live with.

The Night House debuts in theaters on August 20.

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‘The Night House’ Review: A Haunted Rebecca Hall Carries One of the Loudest Horror Movies Ever Made

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2020   Sundance   Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures releases the film in theaters on Friday, August 20.

Once you have your first brush with Death, it can seem like it’s always calling to you from the far shore of the river Styx. After dodging a bullet or losing a loved one, you might hear Charon the ferryman whispering in your ear from time to time, beckoning you to cross over; to come back to the void; to embrace the eternal.

That’s just one of the fun thoughts that may be running through your mind during the first minutes of David Bruckner ’s shudderingly intense and sadistically loud horror movie “ The Night House ,” a grief-stricken portrait of unraveling that begins with a small, empty dinghy bobbing against a dock on the shores of an idyllic New York lake. A path leads up to the beautiful home that Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) built for his wife a few years back — a house that has started to seem considerably bigger in the days since its architect took that boat out into the water one morning and shot himself in the head.

Now, Beth ( Rebecca Hall ) lives there alone, guzzling brandy in the middle of the night and rummaging around for some good reasons. The reason her husband took his own life. The reason why his spirit appears to her every night: First as a thud on the door, then as a naked phantom walking on the lake, and later in a series of ever more hostile and beguiling forms. At one point, a second, blood-red moon hangs in the sky next to the one we know; there’s no evidence to suggest it’s meant to be a vision of Pluto’s largest moon, but Charon only seems to draw closer as “The Night House” reveals the full meaning behind its title.

Suspicious viewers can probably solve that mystery sooner than Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski’s clever screenplay might like (a shame, as the clues they plant along the way — photos of another woman on Owen’s phone, an eerie suicide note, the creepiest blueprints in movie history — bait your imagination better than any horror film since “Hereditary.” But there are still plenty of ominous breadcrumbs to snack on as you wait for Beth to break down, catch up, and question her adamant belief that there’s no life after death. Owen never accepted that, and much of this movie just feels like watching someone gaslight his wife from beyond the grave (a clunky discussion about night terrors casts doubt over the idea that Beth’s visions are proof of ghosts).

But it’s certainly never boring, and not only because the film’s jump-scares are cruel and aggressive enough to cower you into submission. Bruckner, whose second feature after “The Ritual” follows memorable contributions to omnibus horror projects like “The Signal” and “V/H/S,” is a talented genre craftsman with a sick gift for endowing mundane spaces with sinister energy. Beth’s home is not a particularly expressive place — aside from some eerie bedroom windows, nothing about the house’s design betrays its dark foundations — but patient direction warps every corner with awful potential. And the film’s possessed atmosphere provides the architecture for some of the most brutal jolts in recent memory.

An early shock in broad daylight makes it clear that “The Night House” will never let you drop your guard, and Beth’s violent dreams condition you to stiffen your spine every time she falls asleep. All told, Bruckner is eager to play by his own rules, and giddy to break the ones you know. This is psychological horror without the bumper lanes, as the jump-scares in “The Night House” often arrive without any warning whatsoever (as opposed to the standard approach of dropping the music — and cueing the audience — in order for the BANG! to disturb a more perfect silence). Whereas most of this movie’s ilk stick to a mutually agreeable contract with their audience stipulating that all scares will adhere to a “quiet-loud-quiet” rhythm that gives viewers a sense of control over even the most shocking moments, “The Night House” makes that promise with its fingers crossed.

One sequence shrieks into action with a sustained jolt that seems to last for 15 seconds (and lingers in your ears for as many hours), and then pummels viewers with semi-automatic blasts until Beth’s trauma is traced into their eardrums. In theory, this is exactly the kind of formal subversion that standard-issue shlock is missing. In practice, it’s so hostile and domineering that you might find yourself pining for a more predictable approach. Great horror movies should feel unsafe, but this one just leaves you feeling beaten down.

In that light, the biggest shock of all is that the dramatic integrity of Beth’s character manages to survive this relentless sonic assault. If the scares are too piercing and self-insistent to feel as if they’re always motivated by the story, Hall’s committed performance prevents the jolts from ever feeling impersonal. She carries the film on her shoulders, complicating the genre’s usual approach to grief by playing Beth as someone who isn’t afraid of death, who somehow power-chugs all the fine hooch around her house until she’s got enough liquid courage to taunt whatever might be going bump in the night. So much of this lengthy movie consists of Beth foraging around in the dark and triggering loud sound effects, but Hall so actively negotiates her character’s intentions that it never feels like you’re just watching someone fumble around a house of mirrors.

Lost in the limbo between denial and acceptance, Beth wants to find a trace of her husband — she wants to be wrong. And even when the film’s mythology coheres into something underwhelmingly straightforward, Beth’s wary relationship with the great beyond is blunt enough to leave you looking over your shoulder. For as hard as it hits, “The Night House” doesn’t bruise enough to follow you home. But the movie’s soundscape will vibrate around the hollow of your bones for a long time to come; the next time you don’t stop for Death, you might not be able to shake the feeling that Death has kindly stopped for you.

“The Night House” premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival in the Midnight section.

As new movies open in theaters during the COVID-19 pandemic, IndieWire will continue to review them whenever possible. We encourage readers to follow the  safety precautions  provided by CDC and health authorities. Additionally, our coverage will provide alternative viewing options whenever they are available.

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Review: Rebecca Hall keeps the tension building in ‘The Night House’

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The scariest moments in “The Night House,” an elegant nerve-jangler about the sometimes lethal cost of waterfront real estate, are marvels of jump-scare engineering. They’re shivery little reminders of what can happen when ominous music, assaultive sound design and serpentine camera moves are flexed to the state-of-the-art max. I’m as weary of cheap jolts as the next horror fan, but the jolts in this movie don’t feel cheap; if anything, they feel curiously plush, even luxuriant. The director, David Bruckner, doesn’t just mindlessly apply the electrodes; even when he jars you to attention, he always seems to be drawing you into something deeper and more atmospheric. He delivers a scare you can sink into.

He also knows that, when you’re entering haunted-house terrain this unabashedly derivative, even a little investment in psychological tension can pay off in a big way. The moments that stay with you in “The Night House” aren’t the scary ones so much as the tense ones, and to see Rebecca Hall in action is to immediately grasp the difference. As Beth, an upstate New York schoolteacher cycling through shock, grief, rage and fear after her husband’s suicide, Hall puts you on edge almost as much as the house in question. She’s a brooding pleasure to watch here; sometimes you fear less for her than for the people unfortunate enough to get in her way.

You suspect that Beth didn’t suffer fools gladly when her husband was alive, and she suffers them even less gladly now. In one juicy early scene she has a meeting at school with a parent, one of those entitled busybodies who’s chosen the worst possible day to try and bump up her kid’s grade. After a few minutes of passive-aggressive negotiation, Beth calmly announces, “My husband shot himself,” taking a cold, mirthless delight in the woman’s shock and shame as the details come spilling out. The exposition is for our benefit too: We learn about the depression Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) apparently battled in private, the gun he apparently purchased in secret and the little boat in which he did the inexplicable deed.

That boat, still tethered to the dock just below their gorgeous lakeside house, is a grim reminder of tragedy. So is the house itself, which Owen, an architect, designed and built over much of their 14-year marriage. Now his restless spirit seems to live on in the very walls of his stylish glass-and-wood creation, manifesting itself in bloody footprints and self-operating audio equipment and also in dark dreams that tear at Beth’s grip on reality. What disturbs her most, though, isn’t what her husband might be up to now; it’s what he was up to in his final days and weeks.

What is Beth meant to conclude from the unsettlingly occultish design sketches she finds among Owen’s things? Or the photo she finds on his phone of a dark-haired woman to whom she bears an unmistakable resemblance? The script, by the duo of Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski ( “Super Dark Times” ), has fun marinating in these and other possibilities, stranding Beth in a labyrinth that abounds in weird doublings and doppelgängers. And Bruckner, a skilled horror craftsman whose previous films include 2017’s “The Ritual” (and omnibus-style freakouts like “V/H/S” and “The Signal”), treats each new wrinkle in Beth’s investigation with just enough seriousness to entice you along.

The puzzle may ultimately be less than the sum of its intricately ludicrous parts, and its attempts to merge grief and horror — to show them as flipsides of the same emotional coin — pales beside a thematically similar thriller such as “The Babadook.” Still, it’s hard not to appreciate the unique care with which Bruckner and the writers have worked out their story. And it builds to a doozy of a fog-and-mirrors payoff, terrifying and weirdly seductive in equal measure, that seems to be riffing on the Emily Dickinson poem “Because I could not stop for Death.”

Owen, despite or perhaps because of his ambiguities, remains something of a handsome cipher in a movie that keeps leading you back to Beth, into the recesses of a mind with its own long history of dark impulses and buried traumas. Those recesses are something of a sweet spot for Hall, who’s especially good at undercutting her imposing physicality (she towers over most of her co-stars) with a tremulous vulnerability. Here, as in the biographical drama “Christine,” though in a very different emotional register, she shows you a keenly intelligent mind, chafing against social niceties and hovering at the brink of madness.

But the movie isn’t a one-woman show: It’s smart enough to give Beth any number of sharply etched foils, including a concerned neighbor (Vondie Curtis-Hall), a mysterious outsider (Stacy Martin) and, most movingly, a close friend (Sarah Goldberg) who reminds her that she isn’t alone in her turmoil. In these moments, “The Night House,” for all its hellish visions and demonic symbols, emerges as an unusually humane chiller: a movie that delights in pulling the rug out from under you but also cares enough to cushion your fall.

‘The Night House’

Rated: R, for some violence/disturbing images and language including some sexual references Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes Playing: Starts Aug. 20 in general release

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Summary Reeling from the unexpected death of her husband, Beth (Rebecca Hall) is left alone in the lakeside home he built for her. She tries as best she can to keep it together – but then nightmares come. Disturbing visions of a presence in the house calling to her, beckoning her with a ghostly allure. Against the advice of her friends, she begi ... Read More

Directed By : David Bruckner

Written By : Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski

The Night House

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‘The Night House’ Review: Rebecca Hall Shines in This Atmospheric Chiller

We need to talk about how incredible Rebecca Hall is right now ...

[ Editor's Note: This is a re-post of our review from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. The Night House is now in theaters. ]

If you’re looking for a good scare, look no further than The Night House . If you’re looking for an opportunity to explore the grieving process through a crafty character study with an exceptional lead performance, it’s got you covered in that department as well.

The Night House stars Rebecca Hall as Beth. Her husband Owen ( Evan Jonigkeit ) just unexpectedly took his own life and she’s struggling to keep it together and move forward. Making things even more difficult for Beth? She starts having chilling, intense visions in the middle of the night. But, when she wakes up the next morning, there’s no evidence of what she experienced the night before. In an effort to figure out exactly what’s going on and what happened to her husband, Beth starts looking for answers.

There’s a lot to commend in The Night House but we have to begin with Hall’s truly jaw dropping performance. Yes, she scored a Golden Globe nomination for Vicky Christina Barcelona , a SAG nod for being part of the Frost/Nixon cast, and some recognition from the National Board of Review as part of the ensemble in The Town , but it isn’t enough. After the phenomenal Professor Martson & the Wonder Women went largely unnoticed in 2017, it would feel criminal to have Hall’s work in The Night House not get the praise it deserves.

Based on the synopsis, one might expect the role of Beth to be a fairly heavy one and it is, but Hall also infuses the character with a unique sass and determination that makes her a formidable, highly engaging force who’s fascinating to track. There’s one particularly stellar scene at the beginning of the movie that encapsulates it all when Beth, a high school teacher, is approached by a student’s mother about a poor grade. In that moment, and through much of the film, Hall has you hanging on her every word and reaction.

RELATED: 'The Night House' Trailer: Rebecca Hall's Sundance Horror Has Shades of Stephen King

Hall is effortlessly captivating in solo scenes and also boasts loads of chemistry with her co-stars, a vital asset as The Night House hinges on Beth’s relationship with her husband and also her history with her good friend Claire ( Sarah Goldberg ) and her neighbor Mel ( Vondie Curtis-Hall ). The access to happier times for Owen and Beth is limited, but through Hall’s performance and Jonigkeit’s presence, it’s abundantly clear what was lost and what’s at stake. As for Goldberg and Curtis-Hall, what they bring to the film is a major asset in a number of respects. As concerned skeptics, their involvement winds up heightening the sense of isolation and the terror of what Beth experiences when she’s alone in the house. On top of that, there’s also great value to Beth’s support system in the movie, a system that comes into focus in unexpected and satisfying ways as the story progresses.

After the “Amateur Night” segment in V/H/S , “The Accident” in Southbound and his Netflix feature The Ritual , The Night House marks yet another major step forward for writer-director David Bruckner . There are some clarity issues when it comes to the rules of the world Bruckner establishes and how his ideas coalesce, but that only makes the slightest dent in this clever and fascinating scenario. The Night House also functions as a one-two-punch thanks to the thrill of the mystery unfolding and also how that mystery reflects the grieving process.

And Bruckner ensures you feel every ounce of Beth’s heartbreak, frustration and terror through a number of winning technical achievements, namely the atmosphere and sound design. Bruckner and cinematographer Elisha Christian are masters at establishing an appropriately gloomy feel while crafting some stunning landscape imagery and also highlighting the details of the production design. Editor David Marks ’ scare timing couldn’t be better and the same is true of the sound design which will undoubtedly deliver a number of unforgettable jolts throughout the film.

And don’t expect to shake those chills after the movie wraps up. Yes, The Night House does have a clear conclusion but it’s also got themes and ideas that’ll likely get under your skin and stick with you. During his introduction for the movie at its Sundance Film Festival premiere, Bruckner told the crowd that your reaction to the film will probably come down to what you find most frightening, "the idea that ghosts actually exist, or the realization that they don’t." That statement alone rattled me. Having that thought on my mind while watching his movie downright chilled me to the bone.

KEEP READING: Rebecca Hall and ‘The Night House’ Filmmakers on What’s Scarier: Ghosts Existing or Not

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Night House’ on HBO Max, an Eerie Psychological Horror Story Starring an Inspired Rebecca Hall

Where to stream:.

• The Night House
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Now on HBO Max after premiering in theaters in 2021, The Night House is lucky to have Rebecca Hall. The film is a disquieting horror-thriller in which she plays a woman whose grief at the loss of her husband is disrupted by strange, apparently supernatural occurrences. Grievously underrated, Hall is enjoying an interesting career: The Prestige , Vicky Cristina Barcelona , The Town , Christine Chubbuck bio Christine — ESPECIALLY Christine Chubbuck bio Christine , which you probably haven’t seen — and now this, a borderline-arthouse horror film that tells us she’s well-suited for the genre.

THE NIGHT HOUSE : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Beth’s (Hall) husband killed himself, and she’s not handling it well. Booze, sad music, anger. She’s barely coping at home, in the house he designed and built. On the mantle, a photo of her husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit), smiling; another framed photo is of Beth, looking sad and contemplative. Next to the house is a lake. They have a dock and a rowboat. He took the boat out onto the water, then put a pistol against his head. He left behind a note, a cryptic poem. She’s alone and miserable one night when she hears knocking, which has to be something more than just the gate banging in the wind. There are wet footprints from the door down the steps to the dock to the water. Is something supernatural occurring, or is it hallucinatory visions inspired by grief- and alcohol-induced somnambulance? Who knows.

Beth goes to work the next day and gets the type of looks from co-workers that tell us she’s coming back too soon. She’s a teacher, the school year is over, she has grades to input. Her friend Claire (Sarah Goldberg) would’ve done it for her, but Beth says she needs to keep busy. A woman comes in to discuss what she believes is an unfair grade given to her kid, and Beth steamrolls the argument: “My husband shot himself in the head last Thursday.” In her voice is coiled rage and bitterness, an unwillingness to comply with niceties. Blunt as a hammer. Has she always been this way? We learn she died and was revived once, and it surely traumatized her. The fact of the matter is, her wounds are gaping, and she just can’t cover them up. Sometimes she illustrates what happened to Owen with a little gesture: Fingers in the shape of a gun, next to her face, “blam,” she says. So much pain. What does she need? What can we do for her? Who knows.

The ghostly strangeness isn’t a one-time occurrence, though. The sad song turns itself on and off, strange shadows and more footprints appear, an eerie presence hovers, a strange light beams from across the lake where there is no house. She digs through Owen’s stuff, finds some strange books that look vaguely occult; blueprints for a “reverse floor plan” version of the house; a cellphone photo of a woman who looks kind of like Beth but isn’t Beth, which leads to the laptop and several other shots of superficially similar brown-haired women. The mystery deepens with a walk around the lake, to the reverse-doppelganger house, hidden in the woods, unfinished, cloaked with tarps. Is this real, or is Beth losing her grip on reality? Right: who knows. Either way, we’ve got the heebies.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Also from the Extraordinary Actress Elevates a Horror Film Dept.: Toni Collette in Hereditary , Essie Davis in The Babadook . (In fact, The Night House and The Babadook both feature similarly ethereal villains.)

Performance Worth Watching: Without Hall’s full commitment, The Night House would be an empty house. She injects scads of compelling unspoken detail into her character, and it’s the kind of work that turns a potentially silly film into a potent one.

Memorable Dialogue: Beth is just as blunt about what she saw back when she was dead for a few minutes: “I wish I could tell you something — a light at the end of the tunnel. There’s just tunnel.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: There’s a scene deep in the film where Beth, in the eye of a tornado of confusing supernatural hooey, releases pent-up anguish and grief, and in that moment, Hall cuts through the nonsense — admittedly eerie but nonsense nonetheless — and grounds the proceedings in tangibly raw emotion. It needed to happen, lest the movie lose us in a flurry of unusual, but also obfuscatory ghostly shenanigans. The film is a tough nut to crack, not content to spoonfeed us the usual story about vengeful ghosts or spirits delivering warnings. Hint: Google “caerdroia” — the subject of one of Owen’s strange books — for a piece of The Night House ’s odd narrative puzzle.

Or if internet rabbit holes aren’t your bag, you could just appreciate the creepy atmosphere director David Buckner conjures with sound design, locations — especially that house — and an unsettling song by Richard and Linda Thompson, “The Calvary Cross.” Hall’s characterization of a deeply troubled woman is extraordinary, turning Beth’s brutal frankness and prickly demeanor into yet another way to build walls around herself; it’s a harsh angle on the usual explorations of mental illness we see in movies, its complexity yielding authenticity. It’s also a fresh take on the old cliche about not being able to ever truly know another person. The film may require some legwork to fully decode, and whether it truly weaves its myriad mystical strands into a tight narrative is up for debate. It may make more sense on a second watch, and Hall’s work all but assures that would be a rewarding experience.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Night House is a thoughtful and earnestly scary psychological thriller-slash-ghost story.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba .

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The Night House Review

The Night House

Loud jump-scares are high on the agenda of David Bruckner ( The Ritual )’s small-scale but never dull psychological horror. Rebecca Hall is Beth, a teacher whose husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) took his own life, forcing her to live alone in a spooky secluded lakehouse that would look at home on Grand Designs . As with all modern Hollywood depictions of widowhood there’s booze (here it’s brandy) and a lot of clicking through old photos on a MacBook until Beth begins to experience some weird shit: thuds on the door, a naked phantom on the lake, AOR music blasting out in the middle of the night.

Bruckner’s filmmaking is elegant, imbuing the lakehouse with dread.

As Beth suspects she is being haunted by Owen — she also has the after-effects of a previous near-death experience to deal with — screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski throw in lots of oddball details from photos on Owen’s phone of a woman who looks just like Beth, a cryptic suicide note (“Nothing is after you”), a house over the lake that is a mirror image of her own, and a clutch of creepy-ass blueprints. Even on the paranormal terms of a ghost chiller, it is difficult to join-the dots.

But Bruckner’s filmmaking, save an over-use of BIG sound effects to create shocks, is elegant, imbuing the lakehouse with dread, while Hall – a genre stalwart following The Awakening and The Gift – elevates the horror. She is not only unafraid to play the spikier, brittle elements of Beth’s character (there is a terrific scene early on where she drops her façade and delivers full-on honesty to a mother complaining about her son’s grade), but also fully commits to the more outlandish scenes in the script: a potentially cringeworthy moment where she is embraced by a spirit is surprisingly effective. Beth is a rare horror hero who leans into the supernatural rather than runs away from it and Hall plays that arc for all it is worth.

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The night house, common sense media reviewers.

Brief, intense violence against women in effective chiller.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Main character has done nothing to warrant her tor

Beth is a fully fleshed-out character, with her ow

The movie has a kind, sympathetic Black character,

Brief, intense moments of violence. Man violently

Passionate kissing; brief undressing. Naked man st

Several uses of "f--k," "bulls--t," "motherf----r,

Apple computers and iPhones used throughout.

Grieving main character drinks with friends in bar

Parents need to know that The Night House is a horror/thriller film about a woman (Rebecca Hall) who's haunted by vivid nightmares and other things after her husband's death via suicide. Many sequences include brief, intense violence against women, including very rough treatment, strangling, and heads being…

Positive Messages

Main character has done nothing to warrant her torment -- it's connected to an accident when she was younger -- and the movie's gloomy, pessimistic overall theme is that nothing matters, that all of this is for nothing.

Positive Role Models

Beth is a fully fleshed-out character, with her own strengths and needs, but she ultimately becomes a victim; she's terrorized, with not much she can do to protect herself. She does have a final moment of life-saving strength in the end, but, given the movie's theme, it hardly matters much.

Diverse Representations

The movie has a kind, sympathetic Black character, but he's not fully developed. We know nothing about him; his only purpose is to relate to the main character.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Brief, intense moments of violence. Man violently grabs woman, grabs her throat, smashes her head against mirror. Second woman's head is smashed on mirror, dripping blood. Character strangled/smothered in bed. Character thrown down stairs. Man ties woman up. Crime scene with blood on walls, legs of corpse. Gun shown. Mention of death via suicide by gunshot to the head. Jump scares and other spooky stuff. Strange sculpture of woman pierced by metal spikes. Dead bodies, wrapped in plastic. Main character's husband is dead; movie deals with grief and loss.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Passionate kissing; brief undressing. Naked man standing on surface of lake, his back to camera, buttocks shown. Sexually suggestive dialogue. Dialogue about a spouse's possible affair(s).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Several uses of "f--k," "bulls--t," "motherf----r," "a--hole," "Jesus Christ."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

Grieving main character drinks with friends in bar, gets drunk, needs to be driven home. She drinks heavily at home, both wine and whiskey.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Night House is a horror/thriller film about a woman ( Rebecca Hall ) who's haunted by vivid nightmares and other things after her husband's death via suicide. Many sequences include brief, intense violence against women, including very rough treatment, strangling, and heads being bashed against mirrors. Characters are thrown down stairs and bound, and viewers see dead bodies and some blood. A gun is shown, suicide is discussed, and there are several jump scares and creepy moments. A couple kisses passionately and starts to remove their clothing, a man's naked buttocks are seen, and there's dialogue about extramarital affairs, as well as some sexually suggestive dialogue. Language includes several uses of "f--k," plus "bulls--t" and "a--hole." The grief-stricken lead character drinks heavily, both in bars and at home, and appears drunk in more than one scene. The movie doesn't always click, but it has several excellent scares and a strong lead performance. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

In THE NIGHT HOUSE, Beth ( Rebecca Hall ) returns to her spacious lake house, having just buried her husband, Owen, who died via suicide. She's awakened by a knock at the door and discovers wet footprints leading from the lake to her home. Was it a nightmare? Grieving, she starts drinking and going through Owen's things. She discovers a strange sketchbook, full of odd drawings, such as a mirrored version of their home. The ultra-realistic nightmares continue, growing more and more alarming, as Beth further discovers that her husband may have been having affairs with women who resembled Beth. The mystery deepens when Beth sees the lights of a house across the lake -- a house that shouldn't be there.

Is It Any Good?

While it doesn't totally click in every way, David Bruckner 's chiller still manages some truly mind-bending, soul-shuddering scares, which work largely because of Hall 's wrenching performance. In its first two-thirds, The Night House uses skillful direction, set decoration, music, and editing to come up with some great shocks. A knock at the door and Richard and Linda Thompson's song "The Calvary Cross" provide some warm-up scares, but a sequence after Beth gets home from drinking at a bar with friends will make viewers' hair stand up on end. Clever use of negative space and mirror images provides more delicious jolts.

As the story begins to sharpen in focus, the scary stuff lessens, and questions arise, such as: How could Owen have embarked on such a huge building project without Beth knowing about it? A use of semi-flashbacks to explain things seems a little flat, and less interesting than the mystery itself, and a final denouement just doesn't have the intense impact it was meant to; it's almost like the punchline of a joke. But Hall helps sell every scene she's in, conveying indescribable depths of pain and horror, and, overall, there's more than enough good stuff in The Night House to make it worth a visit.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about The Night House 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

How much of the movie's violence is directed toward women? How does that change its nature and impact?

Is the movie scary? What's the appeal of horror movies ? Why do people sometimes like to be scared?

What is the movie's final takeaway? Do you think there's anything after we die? Why, or why not?

Movie Details

• In theaters : August 20, 2021
• On DVD or streaming : October 5, 2021
• Cast : Rebecca Hall , Sarah Goldberg , Vondie Curtis-Hall
• Director : David Bruckner
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Searchlight Pictures
• Genre : Horror
• Topics : Monsters, Ghosts, and Vampires
• Run time : 107 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : some violence/disturbing images, and language including some sexual references
• Last updated : December 25, 2022

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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The Night House Review: A Chilling Thriller with Heart-Thumping Scares

A grieving wife (Rebecca Hall) senses a supernatural force after her husband's suicide in The Night House.

The Night House is a chillingly atmospheric thriller that serves up quite a few heart-thumping scares. Rebecca Hall is fantastic as a grieving wife searching for the answers to a supernatural presence. The film builds great tension then wallops you with menacing imagery. The Night House is visceral and intense without being bloody or gratuitous. The final act leads to an unexpected outcome that may disappoint some audiences. I thought it was very interesting. The film doesn't spoon-feed a rote ending. It's frightening and abstract . Leaving many disturbing possibilities to consider.

The Night House takes place in upstate New York on a beautiful, but remote lake. Beth (Rebecca Hall) is a teacher blindsided by the sudden suicide of her husband, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit). She didn't even know he had a gun. Beth drinks to dull her pain as she packs up his belongings. But late at night in her wretched despair, Beth feels something reaching out to her. The house feels alive with strange noises, shadows, and intermittent outbursts from the stereo.

Beth asks her best friend and co-worker, Claire (Sarah Goldberg), if she believes in ghosts. The mystery deepens when Beth discovers a picture of another woman (Stacy Martin) in her husband's phone; who looks eerily similar to her. Beth's neighbor (Vondie Curtis-Hall) finds her searching the woods. She has seen something across the lake that shouldn't be there. As Beth plunges further down the rabbit hole, the truth behind Owen's death leads to a shocking reveal.

The Night House exploits the basic fears of human nature. It's natural to be afraid when alone in a creepy setting. Anything can be waiting in the dark to strike. The difference here is that the film doesn't succumb to silly horror tropes. It preys on the fragile emotional state of the protagonist. Beth is sad and lonely. She desperately wants to see her beloved again. But she quickly learns that there's something sinister to her otherworldly interactions. The scare factor ramps up significantly. There are legitimate jump out of your seat moments on her quest for the truth.

Rebecca Hall is tremendous in a highly nuanced and multilayered performance. The film succeeds by her believable reactions to the dreaded unknown. Beth continuously evolves throughout the story. At first overcome with sorrow, she steadies her resolve through fierce determination. This isn't a film with silly chases. The jabs come sharp and fast. Owen's secrets lead to an evil she could never have imagined. Hall, especially when she's alone on screen, conveys the raw feelings and terror of fleeting moments.

The last scene is certain to have a few detractors. The Night House takes a different approach to solving the mystery at its core. Director David Bruckner ( V/H/S , The Ritual ) doesn't give an easy out. He forgoes a neat, bow-tie conclusion for a lingering psychological effect. That's refreshing for the genre and skillfully done here. The Night House is a production of Anton and Phantom Four Films. It will be released theatrically on August 20th by Searchlight Pictures.

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• DVD & Streaming

The Night House

• Drama , Horror

Content Caution

In Theaters

• August 20, 2021
• Rebecca Hall as Beth; Sarah Goldberg as Claire; Vondie Curtis-Hall as Mel; Evan Jonigkeit as Owen

Home Release Date

• October 5, 2021
• David Bruckner

Distributor

• Searchlight Pictures

Movie Review

Beth thought she knew what to expect. But the truth is, there are some events in life that are so completely out of your control that all of your surety about everything that came before just blows away like dust.

When Beth’s husband, Owen, rowed out into the middle of the lake near their house and took his life with a pistol (that she didn’t even know they had ) she was left completely adrift. Alone. Afraid. There didn’t seem to be any reason for his choice. And she really wasn’t sure what would come next.

It was a good thing that her school year was near its end. After closing her teacher’s grade book, she went home and just drank for a few days. She didn’t even like the brandy she pulled up out of the basement—that was Owen’s thing—but it kept her foggy enough to knock off the lacerating edges of her emotions.

Then, after days of heavy drinking, she got a phone call from Owen in the middle of the night.

She woke the next morning in a heap on the floor, realizing that it must have been a horrible drunken nightmare. There was no phone call. Nothing had registered on her smartphone or his. But it was enough to get her moving again.

So she started packing up her husband’s clothes, trash-bagging his bathroom stuff and the like. It was when she got to boxing up some of his books that a few things gave her pause. She found duplicate floorplans to another house. It was an opposite, mirror-image version of their own house. And the pages had notes on them that Owen had written about tricking someone.

Then Beth found pictures of her … that weren’t her. She was sure of it. The woman looked like her, the same build, same hair from a distance. But Beth was positive it wasn’t her. So she began to search in ernest. A tiny clue here, a fragment of something there, and before you know it, Beth was in full detective mode.

Sometimes things happen for no reason at all. But sometimes there are reasons, there are tangles to pull apart and mysteries to unfold. And Beth was in the untangling, unfolding mood.

She was desperate for it.

Positive Elements

Beth’s friend and fellow teacher Claire is kind and caring. And she puts effort into seeing Beth through a very difficult and emotional time. Claire offers to stay with her fragile friend and invites her to stay at her home.

Beth’s older next-door neighbor Mel is another individual looking out for her well-being. He had kept a secret from Beth that Owen had begged him to keep, but he eventually tells her the whole truth and does what he can to help her.

[ Spoiler Warning ] We eventually learn that Beth’s husband—while doing some deceptive, terrible things—was actually trying to protect her from something deadly dangerous. In fact, his misguided suicide was even part of that.

Spiritual Elements

As the film begins, viewers could well think this is a ghostly love story mixed with a mystery. After all, Beth does long for her deceased husband. And supernatural things do take place that range from creaking doors and floors, bloody footprints and ghostly figures running across a lawn in the dead of night, to electronics and phones turning on and delivering eerie messages and creepy whispers. Beth also appears to see glimpses of an alternate reality that seemingly holds the spirits of people who have passed before or are trapped in another dimension.

[ Spoiler Warning ] But there is something even more dark and demonic at play here. And if looked at in the right light, The Night House delivers a warning about dabbling in any form of afterlife pursuit. There are certainly nonbiblical spiritual elements here, but there are well-defined illustrations of demonic deceit and deadliness as well.

We hear the tune “The Calvary Cross” partially played several times; its lyrics mix references to the cross and spiritual torment. A Christmas carol plays, singing of Christ the King, during a creepy spiritual moment.

Beth’s neighbor Mel notes that Beth and Owen were a “godsend” when he was dealing with the death of his beloved wife. Beth tells of dying in a car crash before being revived. She also reports that she later told Owen that she saw nothing while dead, “no light at the end of the tunnel.” Owen, however, wanted to believe in more.

She reads passages of a book that make mention of people casting spells.

Sexual Content

Beth discovers that someone has been seducing women who all look very much like her. There are implied sexual relationships in the mix, but we never see any that go beyond an embrace and a kiss.

Beth looks out of her bedroom window and sees the form of her naked husband standing in the yard with his back to her (we see him fully unclothed from the rear). We also see Owen naked and sitting in front of Beth in a row boat (with all key areas covered).

Beth discovers a statuette of a naked female form impaled with several long spikes.

Violent Content

A man seduces and manhandles various women. We see him slamming several of them (in quick glimpses) against a mirror, against a wall and down on the floor. He sometimes grabs the women by the throat. And in one case, it’s apparent that he has killed a woman because of the blood spattering the wall and floor.

In like turn, an invisible entity grabs Beth several times, too. Its invisible fingers run lightly over her arms. But it also grabs her by the throat and slams her up against a wall. She’s knocked out at several points, lifted into the air by her throat and laid down in a small boat.

During her explorations, Beth finds a partially built house and discovers the bodies of a half-dozen dead women, wrapped in plastic and hidden beneath the floorboards.

Crude or Profane Language

There are some 17 f-words and a handful of s-words mixed in with multiple uses of “h—” and “a–hole.” God’s and Jesus’ names are both misused (with the former being combined with “d–n” once).

Drug and Alcohol Content

Beth drinks a lot of wine and brandy. In one case she gets pretty tipsy with fellow teachers drinking beer, wine and mixed drinks at a bar. In another instance she shares a glass of brandy with a woman she just met. But in most cases, Beth drinks alone.  Beth’s friend Claire smokes a cigarette on one occasion.

Other Negative Elements

As mentioned, deception is woven into the story here in various ways.

A well-made horror film can make you think. I’m not talking about jump-scare pics filled with talking dolls or creepy little dark-haired girls skittering across the ceiling. There are some films of the horror stripe that seriously make you pause and ponder the possibility of the spiritual struggles in our world. And the best of those slowly thickening tales will carry on until they swallow a viewer in harrowing ways.

The Night House, featuring the sure-handed and dramatically capable Rebecca Hall, is such a film. She and director David Bruckner have created something that’s unexpectedly rattling. This tale starts off as a wounded woman’s search for resolution and slowly inches its way into palpable darkness.

That’s not to say that you should jump in the car and head to the theater. This R-rated horror story is splattered with as much crass, foul language as it is packed with emotional torment. And though its worst possible visuals are kept off-screen, there’s still murder, physical abuse, infidelity and very dark spirituality in the cinematic coalescence.

The Night House’ s finely tuned and unsettling storyline could provoke a deeper spiritual conversation for some. That said, this is definitely not a film for everyone.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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The Night House explained its meaning through an unsettling blend of ghost story and psychological terror — the kind of film that leaves audiences wondering what the ending really means. When it comes to the scare factors in horror movies, there tend to be two basic types. The first, which is often what Hollywood studios go with, mostly relies on jump scares to startle the audience and keep them on their toes. With The Night House explained, the second is when a horror movie takes a more cerebral approach, building its scares up slowly, and going for creeping out the viewer over startling them.

Most of The Night House is designed to unsettle and disturb. In some ways, the first act feels almost like a classic Ed and Lorraine Warren-type ghost story , but as more secrets are revealed, things take a sharp left turn into the occult and the potentially horrifying reality of what happens after death. Befitting its more psychological horror bent, The Night House 's story, and its ending, are open to multiple interpretations. There's a literal way of looking at things and more symbolic interpretations of what the plot and characters are meant to convey. Either way one looks at it, The Night House explained little of its secrets.

What Happens in The Night House's Ending

The Night House explained that Owen, has suddenly committed suicide, with his wife Beth ( Passing's Rebecca Hall ) trying to pick up the pieces of her life as best she can. As the movie goes on, it's revealed that Owen had a double life that involved him wooing and murdering women who resemble Beth in a house across the lake that's a mirrored version of their home. However, he did this due to a mysterious creature dubbed Nothing, who Rebecca encountered when she briefly died after an accident as a teenager. She didn't remember anything on the other side — but as The Night House explained, she was wrong.

The Nothing tried to push Owen into murdering Beth, sending her back to the other side, but he refused, killing the other women in an attempt to trick the creature. The Night House explained that its characters are forced to commit terrible acts by otherworldly forces — Owen's serial killer strategy eventually stopped working, so Owen killed himself instead. The Night House ends with Nothing taking Beth out on the lake in their small boat to get her to replicate Owen's suicide. She almost gives in, but eventually chooses to live. The movie then goes to credits, leaving it ambiguous whether Beth truly escaped Nothing, or if the entity will try to claim her again in the future.

The Night House Explores The Horrors Of Grief

While the Nothing proves to be a scary and formidable antagonist when one looks at The Night House explained literally, there's a reality-based monster that truly forms the center of the narrative. The true antagonist isn't the Nothing but — like many modern horrors such as The Babadook — grief. Few things are certain in life, but one of them is that it will one day end. Dealing with death can be the hardest thing most people ever have to do. That's even more true when someone loses their spouse, who many see as their other half, their best friend, the person meant to grow old alongside them.

The Night House explained Beth is not handling her husband's suicide well. It lends credence to the idea that her friends would doubt her story about a potential haunting. It's grief that drives Beth's quest to dig further into her husband's secrets, despite being warned away from doing so. Each revelation makes things worse. Beth can't stand the thought that her husband has not only left her but done so without telling her the whole truth. Like many of the best horror movies , grief essentially drives the story, and while ghosts, demons, and the Nothing might not be a real-life threat, grief will be for everyone someday.

What The Nothing Really Is

Anyone who prefers horror movie endings to tie things up in a neat bow left The Night House disappointed. Truthfully, The Night House explained little. One unanswered question is what the Nothing that so desperately wants to reclaim Beth remains really is. It's possible the creature is Death itself, but it seems odd Death would become obsessed with a particular person. Nothing could be a demon, but where it takes Beth at the end, a red-lit, dual-mooned dark inversion of the real lake, doesn't seem to be Hell . If anything, the barren place seems like some sort of purgatory between life and the afterlife.

This idea is supported by the fact that when Beth asks Nothing where her husband is. It responds Owen has gone somewhere else. Whether that's Heaven, Hell, or something not tied to traditional Christian theology is unclear, but his soul isn't there. That makes it most likely that the Nothing — so named because Beth said she saw "nothing" while she was dead, with Owen putting in his suicide note that "nothing" was after Beth — is something that resides in this void between worlds. Something about Beth attracts its desire.

What The Night House Ending Really Means

While it's interesting to speculate about what the Nothing might be, there seems to be a hidden message attached to The Night House ending, one that doesn't even really need to acknowledge anything supernatural in order to work. The Night House explained that Beth begins the movie in the throes of grief, and as mentioned previously, it's the grief that drives her onward toward the truth. It's also grief that the Nothing tries to use to get her back, with her believing for some time that the "spirit" visiting her is actually Owen's.

As sad as it is, many people prove incapable of withstanding the onslaught of grief, and shut down emotionally, or even worse, take their own life out of despair. The Night House ending sequence with the Nothing and Beth on the boat, with it trying to convince her to shoot herself, functions as a metaphor for this battle against letting grief take full hold of one's mind. The Nothing is an embodiment of grief, and it's telling Beth there's no point in going on without her husband. In the end, Beth decides not to kill herself. Of course, one wonders what happens to the bodies of Owen's victims now.

How Director David Bruckner Explains The Night House

Though The Night House explained little of its ending's meaning and left Beth's fate somewhat ambiguous, director David Bruckner opened up about the making of the film to The Playlist while in the throes of creating the Hellraiser reboot and revealed some key information. Funnily enough, Bruckner believed there were a lot of tonal and thematic similarities between The Night House and Hellraiser. Namely, screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski took inspiration from the Hellraiser draft, with Bruckner stating, "There’s a certain synergy between all these ideas, and there’s a mind-bending quality to The Night House that translates well to Hellraiser."

Many of David Bruckner's horror movies contain this thread of logic in which there's something sinister on the other side beckoning back to the living, and as The Night House explained its meaning it's clear this film is no exception. Bruckner admitted that The Night House script tapped into something within himself that was unresolved: confronting nothingness and the essence of meaning. "This character is reckoning with meaninglessness in a way that is real, and spoken about in the film with such stark frankness by Beth. I was troubled by the script after reading it. And over time, I realized that really had to be a reason to make it," Bruckner said.

This questioning of meaning and reality is shown through the ever-changing architecture in The Night House . Bruckner stated that mapping the geography of a home is a great metaphor for the annals of the mind. In terms of how this played out in The Night House , Bruckner had this to say: "the idyllic picture of the house, as constructed by Beth’s late husband, was a fix for some of their difficulties and emotional issues that they had faced. In some ways, this was supposed to be something that saved them from themselves. And, of course, they encounter the inverse version of it."

Will The Night House Get A Sequel

With The Night House being either a ghost story or a metaphor for grief, a sequel seems unnecessary. While the idea of creating horror sequels is always there for studios, especially when a movie ends up a success at the box office, some don't need to bother. This is not a gore-heavy horror movie . As a story, this movie stands on its own well. Sure, there could be more with Beth and the Nothing in the future, but the ending of this movie makes that seem uninspired. Why go back on her making the strong decision to go on living?

Even more important is the idea that The Night House explained — it was about overcoming grief. When Beth decided she was not going to take her own life, she chose to live. She beat the Nothing and moved on with her life. The Night House is a personal story about a woman dealing with loss and depression. This movie doesn't need a follow-up, and there is no sign that the studio plans to follow through with a sequel.

Other Horror Movies That Turned Negative Emotions Into Monsters

Like from The Night House , many recent horror movies — such as Ti West's Pearl — prefer crafting villains that exemplify emotions. Monsters made tangible like grief, envy, stress, and anger illustrate the power of storytelling. The Babadook shows the personification of a woman's grief over her husband's death. If she ignores the grieving process, it will consume her. In Titane , while Alexia functions as both the hero and villain, the film additionally explores how much grief and desperation can color someone's perspective. The Night House explained something similar.

Hereditary and Midsommar feature people navigating the horrors of losing loved ones. Dani in Midsommar needs to grapple with a cheating boyfriend, and her intense feelings of betrayal dictate her character arc. In the end, she's delighted to watch her ex burn alive. Hereditary shows the impact of a sudden, tragic loss on a family dynamic, tying supernatural and cult elements to a spiraling sense of helplessness. Sometimes, the most horrifying monsters live inside the mind, and The Night House explained that perfectly.

• SR Originals

Horror movie ‘Late Night With the Devil’ earns eerie amount at box office, Variety reports

(NEXSTAR) – In an eerie twist that’s sure to please the publicity team behind “Late Night With the Devil,” the new horror movie earned $666,666 at the box office on Sunday, Variety reported.

The film, which hit theaters March 22, earned a total of $2.8 million during its entire opening weekend. In doing so, it also gave IFC Films its biggest opening weekend ever, shattering the previous record of $826,775 earned during the opening of 2022’s “Watcher” despite debuting on roughly the same number of screens, according to Variety .

It’s worth nothing that Box Office Mojo, an online resource for box-office data, did not yet account for Sunday’s earnings for “Late Night With the Devil” on its site as of Monday. ( Deadline published estimates that the film earned slightly more than Variety reported — $733,000 on Sunday — though representatives for IFC Films were not immediately available to confirm the box-office tally for Nexstar.)

The found footage-style horror film stars David Dastmalchian (“The Suicide Squad,” “Oppenheimer”) as Jack Delroy, the host of a fictional 1970s talk show.  

“However, ratings for the show have plummeted since the tragic death of Jack’s beloved wife,” reads a plot description at the film’s official site. “Desperate to turn his fortunes around, on October 31st, 1977, Jack plans a Halloween special like no other — unaware he is about to unleash evil into the living rooms of America.”

As of Monday morning, the movie had earned favorable “certified fresh” rating of 97% at Rotten Tomatoes. The film fared slightly worse by the standards at MetaCritic, with a score of 72 (which still indicated “generally favorable” reviews from critics).

 “Late Night With the Devil” opened sixth at the box office over the weekend behind “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire ($45 million), “Dune: Part Two ($18 million), “Kung Fu Panda 4” ($17 million), “Immaculate” ($5.4 million) and “Arthur the King” ($4.4 million), per IMDb.

Still, Scott Shooman the head of the AMC Film Group — the parent company of IFC Films — told Deadline that the opening numbers for “Late Night With the Devil” were encouraging.

“’Late Night With The Devil’ continues to showcase that there is still potential for highly reviewed, intelligent auteur films in movie theaters across all genres,” Shooman said.

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The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time.

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