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

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.

Where to stream The Night House