Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Beach House’ on Shudder, in Which Primordial Forces Descend Upon a Couple Vacationing Seaside

The Beach House might be Shudder‘s highest profile original film yet — or at least since 2017’s Revenge inspired a theatrical release prior to its debut on the horror-centric streaming service. Anchored by star-on-the-rise Liana Liberato (of Hulu’s teen series Light as a Feather and underrated drama To the Stars), The Beach House arrives with a bit of buzz for first-time director Jeffrey A. Brown and the promise of a few sturdy sci-fi scares.

THE BEACH HOUSE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Setting: THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN, IN A VERY DEEP PART WHERE THE SMOKY LIQUID GUTS OF THE EARTH VENT INTO THE WATER AND YOU DON’T THINK ANYTHING COULD LIVE THERE, BUT THINGS IMPROBABLY LIVE THERE. Ominous atonal drone music swells, then WHAM: the title card, THE BEACH HOUSE. This bodes unwell for Emily (Liana Liberato) and Randall (Noah Le Gros), who arrive at his parents’ Massachusetts oceanside beach house during the quiet off-season. Is it quiet, too quiet? Mmmmmmaybe.

Randall and Emily haven’t been the perfect couple lately. He disappeared suddenly for a while, existentially disillusioned with his pursuit of a college education and the likely conventional life path that follows. He criticizes her desire to attend grad school as “bullshit,” conveniently ignoring how her pursuit of astrobiological knowledge rewards righteous curiosity, and is not just a stepping stone to a dreary nine-to-five. Conveniently, it also may just have direct application to whatever is happening under the sea, under the sea.

But a landbound problem must be dealt with first: What with one thing and another, someone else is in the beach house when they arrive. Luckily, they’re friendly. Mitch (Jake Weber) and Jane (Maryann Nagel) are old friends of Randall’s father, and the four of them end up sharing a meal of fresh oysters, wine and a chocolate bar infused with the wicked weed, which makes them high as crap, and possibly may be gaslighting them when a weird fog surrounds the house, the air seems to be alive with neon-blue floaters and the foliage is dripping with something best described by the layperson as glow-in-the-dark primordial ooze, which may not be something one wants to eff with, although one might not have a choice.

The subsequent hangover is epic: Jane looks psychologically hollowed-out, Mitch is terminally melancholy, Randall experiences nigh-cataclysmic gastrointestinal distress and Emily encounters a nightmarish line of beached Portuguese men o’ war, accidentally steps on one, and ends up with a nightmare worm resembling one of Cthulhu’s writhing tentacles embedded in her foot. And then everything gets significantly unbetter!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: We’ve got some Carpenterisms from The Fog and The Thing stirred and scrambled with a couple Romero-zombie flourishes, in some unseen terrors from The Mist and bio-horror via the plant-person segment in Creepshow.

Performance Worth Watching: Liberato is absolutely up to the task of a highly physical, drag-me-to-hell performance similar to, well, Alison Lohman’s in Drag Me to Hell.

Memorable Dialogue: A little light dinner conversation:

Emily, explaining her interest in astrobiology: “It has more to do with life on this planet, how organisms can adapt to extreme environments that we could not even survive. It’s the point where chemistry becomes biology, somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, we think. Life is so fragile. We’re the right combination of elements, the right temperature, the right distance from the sun, in this measure of time-space, developing, changing, billions of years. One thing slightly off, and we’d be nothing. Dust or gas or something. I’m in awe of it.”

(Pause)

Mitch: “Over my head!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: I hope I’ve suitably danced around the dubya-tee-eff reveals that aren’t already in the trailer (seriously, don’t watch trailers), because the less you know, the better the experience of the movie. Writer-director Brown does many things right: Casting Liberato as the lead, conjuring eerie vibes, balancing richly suggestive conceptual fodder with a few potent visual payoffs. He injects a simple premise with relatively substantial subtext addressing humans’ insignificance in the greater ecology of the planet (and maybe the universe), then dresses it up with some adept, squirm-worthy practical-effects blecch.

The movie doesn’t always hang together tonally. You can sense Brown aiming for suspenseful, visceral intensity, but he doesn’t drive the screws quite deep enough. Without even a few crumbs of humor, the movie is a touch more grueling than it is enjoyable. And the ending is visually inspired at the expense of a tight narrative.

Yet Brown’s ambition, manifest in a keen eye for provocative abstraction and disorienting angles, drives the picture confidently for a modest 88 minutes. It exists in a comfortable space between traditional and neo-arthouse horror. It’s kind of pro-weed; it’s kind of pro-earth in a nihilistic way; it kind of flirts with greatness even though it doesn’t quite reach it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Beach House is a good, solid creeping-dread atmospheric scare flick, inspiring a healthy passel of enthusiasm for its director’s next effort.

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.

Stream The Beach House on Shudder