The Popcorn Frights Film Festival is back in action for 2021, this time with a hybrid festival taking place both in-person and online. And this year, they started out with a good one.
The Night House (2021)
Rated R for some violence/disturbing images, and language including some sexual references
Score: 4 out of 5
The Night House, probably the biggest movie at Popcorn Frights this year, set a high bar for the rest of the festival to follow. Anchored by an excellent turn by Rebecca Hall, this is a damn creepy little movie that starts out like a traditional ghost chiller but goes off in some more unusual, occult directions as it goes on, feeling more influenced by "New Weird" fiction and even H. P. Lovecraft than it does by traditional haunted house tales as our heroine finds herself battling something much stranger and more personal than a mere "g-g-g-g-ghoooooost!!!". It uses its unsettling atmosphere and dream logic to build an environment where it feels like the setting itself is out to get the protagonist, and combines that with a bleak central conceit that takes the idea that there isn't actually an afterlife waiting for us and runs with it. The plot is twisting, but it all makes sense eventually, and ends on a suitably chilling note. Set to premiere in theaters next week, I highly recommend that you check it out.
Our protagonist Beth is a schoolteacher in upstate New York whose husband, an architect named Owen, recently killed himself for reasons that Beth cannot figure out. Hints as to what might have happened to Owen start to arrive when a mysterious presence seems to haunt Beth, who, despite not believing in the afterlife, immediately suspects is Owen's ghost reaching out to her from beyond the grave. Looking through her late husband's belongings, she finds that not only was he possibly cheating on her, but he was also interested in the occult, an interest that heavily informed the design of the lakefront house Beth lives in that he had built himself. The realization that she did not know Owen half as well as she thought she did, combined with memories of a near-death experience she sustained when she was young, slowly collide and make her, and the viewer, wonder just what the hell is going on, a question that she has to answer before whatever the hell is stalking her finally catches her.
This film's vision of the supernatural is not about classic spook-show visual tricks, but about mathematics and angles. The mysterious force stalking Beth hides in plain sight more often than not, in various arrangements of seemingly innocuous objects that, from the right perspective, look like a human figure -- especially when that figure seems to move. Without spoiling anything, it's shown early on that Owen designed the house as a maze for supernatural forces to get lost in, preventing them from reaching the human occupants, a measure that he undertook in an effort to protect Beth from... something that has been stalking her ever since that fateful night when she almost died. This was a movie that had me on the lookout for any part of the environment that had any sort of vaguely human shape to it, playing on my pareidolia and pattern recognition to make it feel as though evil was hiding behind every corner. I do think I spotted that mystery force in some scenes where it wasn't meant to be the focus, too. (Or maybe the film just got to me.) Combine that with more classic scares and some expert use of dream sequences that hearkened back to the original A Nightmare on Elm Street in how they always left it ambiguous whether or not the main character was dreaming, and you had a film that created a feeling that you were never safe even as it went light on big jump scares. At its tightest, the atmosphere was oppressive and had me tense up in anticipation of what lay behind this corner, or in the fog.
Through all of it, Rebecca Hall is our anchor as Beth, bringing a jaded, world-weary snark to the normal haunted heroine. It's implied but never stated that she's been an atheist ever since her near-death experience, and this film is rooted in a distinctly atheistic, almost Lovecraftian conception of the supernatural, one where there are no gods or angels to save the heroes and in which there is only nothing after death. Instead of going mad like your typical Lovecraftian protagonist, the revelation just made her depressed and alcoholic, drowning her sorrows with her co-workers in the evening and handing out a passing grade on an assignment that a student didn't complete just to get his mother out of her office and her hair. Her attitude towards the supernatural force tormenting her is at first one of annoyance, opening the door to more or less tell it to get off her lawn, though eventually, her sorrow at losing Owen means that her cool, snarky façade eventually cracks. Hall is outstanding as a woman on a downward spiral, slowly learning the truth about what her husband was really up to and being pushed to the brink by the thought that the abyss she stared into that fateful night so many years ago may have stared back at her, never forgetting the one who got away.
The Bottom Line
A dark and unique twist on the classic ghost story both aesthetically and in the themes it explores, The Night House is a nifty and creative supernatural horror film that gets my full approval.
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