The Night House

 

The House By
The Symmetry

The Night House
USA/UK 2020
Directed by David Bruckner
Walt Disney

Warning: Some mild spoilers.

The Night House is an interesting film and I almost had a really great time with it. I say almost because, like the plot development of the dream world depicted in certain moments in the film, it’s very much a game of two halves. I’ll get to that in a while but let me tell you some of the plot set up and the good stuff first.

Well, for starters, it’s got one of my favourite modern actresses playing the lead protagonist, Rebecca Hall (from amazing movies like The Awakening, reviewed here and Professor Marston And The Wonder Women, reviewed here) as Beth. And she really is fantastic in this (isn’t she always, even in lesser movies like Iron Man 2). The film starts when she returns to her lake house, after her husband’s funeral. Her husband, who designed and built the house, has shot himself in a boat in the lake with no inclination that he had suicidal tendencies and Beth, a local school teacher, is left to deal with her grief. There are a few other characters in the film such as her best friend Claire, played by Sarah Goldberg... but the majority of the film is just Beth dealing with her grief and then being caught up in weird events when she is regularly awoken by a presence she believes is her dead husband.

And all that stuff is great. There are a few good jump scares to it although, admittedly, when it does try this one too many times too often, such as a shot following Beth dozing off while laying on Claire’s knee (I don’t think it was supposed to be a reference to Éric Rohmer), the scares do start getting more predictable and, therefore, not scary, it has to be said. But the moody atmosphere is kept going throughout and I’m pleased to say, in terms of the supernatural occurrences in the film, the movie delivers the goods and doesn’t cop out when it comes to escalating the degrees and machinations of the antagonistic phenomena.

Also, Rebecca Hall really does carry the movie for a lot of the time. In her interactions with the occasional character that crops up, such as a woman she finds her husband may have had an affair with (it’s more complicated than that), Beth is written as a very sharp, stand offish, confrontational and smart woman and, yeah, that’s tailor made for an intelligent actress like Hall, for sure. And great swathes of the movie are just her on her own with barely any dialogue, so you need someone like her in this kind of movie.

The film is loaded with beautiful shot compositions too. The director uses very clear vertical sections and splits to delineate different areas of the house and even uses a shot I’d seen done in a new movie a few weeks before, where Beth’s head is small in the shot and framed within a rectangle of a grid of windows, as we look in at her from outside the house. It turns out, the symmetry of the compositions and the camera movements around those little vertical splits are very much a part of the story and there is a really neat trick where the director uses the negative shape of a column (think of the old candlestick illusion of the two faces in profile), which looks like a man’s face, to surprise the audience when the face made out of the negative space looks around at Beth. Unfortunately, the director seems so pleased with this shot that he repeats the trick a fair few times after that and it loses its impact very quickly.

The real problem is the bizarre mix of over sharing the various mysteries of the house... it’s ‘backwards’ twin house, some kind of occult rituals, Beth’s back story containing a ‘dead for four minutes’ experience, a book on Caerdroia (a term for a Welsh turf maze which I think is supposed to be a metaphor for the construction of the house itself) and various ghost women running to the lake... and giving the audience too many elements to process without really explaining the relevance of a lot of them. Now I know the ‘secret’ at the heart of the mystery, for example, I am still left scratching my head about the relevance of a lot of the plot elements found in the movie. It feels, by the last reel, vaguely unsatisfying and like the writers just let it all go and spoiled all that good build up. I must confess that, once I’d realised the film was over, I said to myself that I must read the novel this film is obviously based on to find out the real significance of all the occult jigsaw puzzle pieces scattered throughout... only to find out that it’s not even based on a book and is an original screenplay. So, yeah, I really didn’t understand how a lot of these things fit in and I’m not usually that slow on the uptake in most movies.

So, what else can I say about The Night House other than it has a gorgeous score by Ben Lovett which I wish had gotten a proper CD release? If you’re a big Rebecca Hall fan then definitely take a look at this one as she’s always an interesting actress to watch. If you’re a horror fan... I suspect this wasn’t made with you in mind because it’s not going to scare you much, I would think. If you’re not normally a watcher of the genre, then you may get something out of this one and it’s probably a good, light introduction to the supernatural, if you have a hankering to try out something like that. I probably won’t be watching this one again anytime soon and I just wish someone would tap Rebecca Hall to make a proper sequel to The Awakening at some point in the near future, to be honest.

The Ritual (2017)

In Tents Horror

The Ritual (2017)
2017 UK Directed by David Bruckner
UK cinema release print.

The Ritual is a UK horror movie directed by David Bruckner and based on a novel by Adam Nevill. I’ve not read the book myself but, from what I can see on brief mentions of the plot hook, the whole reason the four friends are going on a hiking trip to Sweden in this movie is either absent in the book or, maybe, a reveal later on. I don’t know which but I expect some major changes have been made... however, it’s clear that I am unqualified to pass any kind of judgement on this in terms of its success as an adaptation so, you know, the usual caveats apply as far as that goes.

As in the trailer, the movie starts off with five friends in a pub but when two of the friends go to an off licence at the request of main protagonist Luke, played here by Rafe Spall, they get into a spot of bother when they accidentally disturb a robbery in progress. Luke hides but is forced to watch his best mate killed while doing nothing himself. 6 months later he and the other three remaining friends of the group, including the annoying Dom played by Sam Troughton (grandson of The Second Doctor, Patrick Troughton) attempt to fulfill what their dead friend Robert (played here by Paul Reid) would have wanted for their annual ‘lads’ trip... a hiking holiday in Sweden. You so know this is going to go wrong... right?

So, yeah, when the weather gets cold the four chums are wanting to get where they’re going on their hike quicker, especially after Dom twists his ankle... so they decide to cut through a big, spooky looking forest and shave some hours off their time. You would think that when they come across a freshly killed animal strung up in a ritualistic pose in a tree, the blood still dripping from its body (I think it was a horse but I’m not 100% certain due to the way the body is arranged), they might want to turn back the way they came but, no, this is a group of lads so the whole thing gets very Blair Witch very quickly... especially when they stumble upon a deserted cabin with strange ritualistic totems and an unnerving atmosphere. When the four awake from some very unusual nightmares, they find themselves strangely compromised and, from then on, everything goes into full-on survival horror mode while they four are whittled down in number as they try to find their way out of the woods before, something, finishes playing with them and killing them off.

And it’s actually very well put together. Maybe not as intensely scary as you might hope but it's certainly very suspenseful in places. The director does some very nice things with the way it’s shot which I really liked. You get the obvious ‘camera looking at the backgrounds of the forest’ so the audience can strain to see whether they can see anything lurking on the peripherals but there’s also some very blatant stuff where he will just point the camera away from the main parts of the shot, into another part of the forest or looking up at the sky and... he will just hold it there and just put these deliberate pauses into the flow of the action. Which is something I thought was quite effective, actually.

Another nice thing that’s done on more than one occasion in the movie is to blend bits of the forest into flashbacks of the main protagonist’s earlier encounter in the newsagent. While there’s certainly a sense that the four friends have had very vivid dreams, you also get a sense that the thing they are up against in this is manipulating their minds while, simultaneously, you get the feeling that Luke’s dead friend Rob is trying to help him survive his experiences from beyond the grave. The director shows this by, as I said, blending the two environments and the people into various bits of the forest, quite unexpectedly, at various points in the narrative. Now I couldn’t work out if this was done as CGI or built practically as sets (it looked good enough that it could have just been created on the sets themselves rather than with ethereal looking computer aided trickery) but it’s very effective and helps give the film another level of surprise to keep you off guard as an audience and thus keep you vulnerable for the next big scary moment... depending on whether you actually felt the film was frightening or not.

So... yeah, there’s also some nicely effective scoring by Ben Lovett which is just the right side of being ‘B-movie over the top’ in places without being too clichéd and with some really relaxing atmospheric textures in it too (alas, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of soundtrack for the release of this one, as yet, which is a shame). And this, coupled with some fine performances from all the actors, a nice reveal on the kinds of people you would expect to meet in the middle of a forest and even a mini King Kong homage (I suspect)... all make for a nicely entertaining, ‘satisfyingly pulpy’ horror movie. However, there is one slightly disappointing thing about the movie and it’s this...

None of the characters are that sympathetic or, honestly, anyone you’d really want to hang out with if they were in your local pub. Especially the main protagonist Luke, who is played brilliantly by Rafe Spall but, he’s not exactly someone who you’d want to get to know. So, all in all, I really didn’t mind if the whole lot of them got killed throughout the course of the movie if I’m being brutally honest and this, for me at any rate, watered down the tension to some extent. You kind of go through the movie expecting Luke to redeem himself and make good on his inaction at the start of the film which ‘possibly’ got his friend killed but, as the story wanders on, although you can see he wants to finally do what’s right, I didn’t get the feeling that he’d made good on his shot at redemption by the time the credits roll. In some ways, it just re-enforces the lack of moral fibre the character exhibits from the start of the film, if you have a think about the way things are left here (which I'm obviously not going to reveal).

Still, for all that, I’d still say go and see The Ritual if you are a fan of horror movies and it’s still playing on a big screen. It’s nicely performed, nicely shot and has a lot going for it as long as you don’t feel you have to like the characters. It’s never going to be the greatest horror movie in the world but there are some nice moments which make it worth taking a look at if you have the time.  Not something I’d watch again but highly recommended in terms of the quality of the piece.