After a long time of waiting, ‘The Night House’ has premiered on Disney +, the new horror film by David Bruckner, director of the notable Netflix’s ‘El Ritual’ (The Ritual, 2017), after having been seen for the first time in the already distant Sundance 2020. One of those pandemic setbacks that finally ended up on the small screen after the frustrated announcement that it was going to reach the cinemas this summer on July 16, then in late August, by Searchlight Pictures.
And it’s a shame, because we are looking at a fantastic esoteric variation of the haunted house cinema, with a huge Rebeca Hall as the protagonist, who is posed to see on the big screen, with a haunting use of architecture to create terror with pareidolias, shapes and reflections that should not go unnoticed in a time of terror with much more explicit appearances, which can become a way out for the genre when there is no more room for scares.
Hidden secrets and doomed architectures
Hall plays a teacher who continues to live in the house built by her architect husband after his suicide, until she begins to feel a strange presence in her that does not know if it is a ghost or his own imagination. The situation becomes more worrying when the widow discovers some secrets from the deceased’s past, which after their 14 years of marriage arrive like a jug of cold water.
All the apparitions revolve around the way his love, Owen (Evan Jonigketi), left the house he built by the lake at night, rowed out to the water and shot himself in the head, and the added traumatic factor that He gave no warning signs, nor was there any indication that anything between them might be wrong. The mystery also explodes in the viewer when the cryptic note he left his wife is revealed to us “You were right, there is nothing, nothing is chasing you, now you are safe“.
Confusion and frustration over uncertainty are crossed by strange events, such as the stereo turning on only in the middle of the night, or the visions that seem to have clues about the elusive purpose of her husband’s death: photos on the phone , possible third parties and mysteries that carry the argument by a roller coaster of sinister twists and turns, which are not what they seem, and even at the end of the film they seem to be clear.
Exploring Grief, Depression, and Suicide
However, ‘The Night House’ keeps its best weapon in working out the details, running away from the style of recent supernatural horror cinema with a drama tone without easy scares or appearances. The exploration of grief through terror connects with the melancholic tone of ‘At the end of the stairs‘(The Changeling, 1980) or’ Amenaza en la sombra ‘(Don’t Look Now, 1973), with which he has in common strange visions, intangible premonitions and moments of sleep with enigmas that uncover an original occult background.
Bruckner addresses horrors of shadows, presences and forms, which are a pain metaphor with chilling implications for depression and suicide. Her revelations make her reconsider from the beginning and she hides much more than what appears in her information about the house, the figures that are found and the books where the protagonist seems to find a line of breadcrumbs towards the truth. Rebeca Hall embroiders a cynical and deeply wounded character who reacts to her husband’s hidden past in surprising ways.
Nothing is what it seems and all we see are reflections of the truth, which involve a hidden struggle that we only intuit, where the house where they lived comes into play and an unheard of return to some of the most casual comments in conversations a priori without much importance. ‘The Night House’ is not a riot of shocking images, it is directed with elegance and delves into psychological horror with echoes of films like ‘The Curse of the Bishop’ (1971) but almost with a tone of a 90s thriller that deceives. There is nothing randomly placed and its puzzle leaves room to rebuild it again days later and return to it in the future.