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.

V/H/S

Taped Heck 

V/H/S
2012 UK
Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, David Bruckner, Tyler Gillett, Justin Martinez, Glenn McQuaid, Radio Silence, Joe Swanberg, Chad Villella, Ti West, Adam Wingard
Momentum Blu Ray Region B

I remember wanting to see this movie when it did the festival circuit a couple of years ago, despite seeing some pretty mixed word of mouth, so to speak, on Twitter. Ultimately, it’s a movie which seems to doom itself to failure in some ways, fairly early on in the game but, at the same time it’s certainly a nice idea to present an old style horror anthology by using the, relatively, new popularisation of the old found footage variation of horror film. And, it has to be said, there are some fairly bright moments in the movie that make it worth persevering with through the negative stuff and I can certainly see why a couple of more enthusiastically received sequels have already been made in what is now a strong, found footage franchise.

The film is all shot on VHS tape... well, probably not actually, it’s probably shot on something much better and visually downgraded after the fact. This becomes especially apparent in the last story of the movie where some interesting CGI stuff is utilised throughout yet another “shaky cam” sequence. This, of course, allows for the various crews getting away with all kinds of bad camera work and not having to think too much about the design of any particular sequence in terms of framing... other than the details of the set or location dressing, of course.

The framing story starts off really quite badly by inviting us to follow a bunch of thugs who have been hired to steal a specific VHS tape from a house. Unless you are some kind of hoodlum yourself, you will find yourself having absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for any of the characters and will want to see them all die in as horrible a way as can be conceived, right from the outset. Now, while this may well be the tactic being deployed by the filmmakers here, for me this just didn’t work that well. If I can’t sympathise with any of the victims then I’m really not going to invest enough emotion in them for the scenes of suspense to work on me and while the director was taking great delight in showing little, telling details unheralded in a corner of a frame, such as a corpse vanishing, for instance, this stuff really didn’t get the heart racing as much as I’d hoped a horror movie might.

The idea is that while the hoodlums are going through the house, one of them starts watching the various other “found footage” VHS tapes in the TV room and we watch these along with him... and it’s here that the film threatened to lose me on two counts.

The first problem is that the group of characters in the next found footage film are basically... another bunch of hoodlums not much different from the ones in the framing footage and who have absolutely no sympathy from me when they start dying. The other problem is, and this should really have been a no brainer of a mistake not to make, is that we are no longer watching the video footage we were watching... somehow, each of the miniature found footage stories are now directly on our screens. So that completely kills that concept then... did someone splice these onto one long tape in just the right places so that the framing story can then take over again in between each segment? This makes absolutely no sense and it was just about now that I kind of gave up on the film inside my head for a bit.

Luckily for me, the first story has an enthralling femme fatale, lets call her the “I like you” girl, in the form of British actress Hannah Fierman and it was her that got me interested again. Now it’s obvious, right from the outset, that no good is going to come out of the main protagonists hooking up with her at a party (yeah, good, they all deserved to die for their thuggish behaviour anyway) but it’s such an old school dose of clichéd but classic sexual horror that I was enchanted with it in some ways... primarily, I suspect, because the actress I just mentioned had such an interesting screen presence.

After this segment, the film becomes a bit of a hit and miss affair, as would be expected in these kinds of anthologies. The majority of the scenarios presented to us are nothing too new but, in some cases (the well made ones), this really doesn’t matter. There’s a nice “haunted apartment” section, for instance, which turns into something else and which, while not altogether unsurprising, has enough in terms of the writing and performance that, if anything, it leaves you feeling the segment was just a little too short. The down side of that, however, is that it’s not actually pseudo-VHS footage... it’s pseudo-Skype footage... which, of course, makes even less sense when you consider it in the context of the found footage framing device... what, somebody transferred their collected Skype conversations to VHS tape. Why?

Another segment is a “final girl” story with a nice “Predator-like” killer who can only be seen on video and with a main protagonist who is using her companions as bait to catch him... which could have been quite refreshing and is relatively well done visually but which has a script and story that really lets it down. Seriously, if you’re going to go hunting a killer, you take weapons with you and not rely on setting traps which it’s obvious couldn’t have been made and prepared in the ridiculously short amount of time played out via the footage. No matter how unintelligent the characters are in horror films, sometimes as a necessity, this one really takes the cake for a person going in completely unprepared and needlessly. So the twist in the tale in that one was tempered by the quite extraordinary lack of brain power of the person who sets events in motion in this one.

There are around six stories in the film in total and, while some of them do hold your interest... and some of them do finally have some characters who are at least a little sympathetic... it’s not exactly the best set of horror shorts I’ve seen although, the last story with it’s Dennis Wheatley style shenanigans is quite nicely done with some well executed special effects. There was an alternative ending on this sequence which I’m glad the director didn’t go with but, strangely, this story marks the end of the film. The framing story is, surprisingly, already played out by the time this last segment appears with, pretty much, no context... so it was a bit of a jarring ending in some ways.

Ultimately, although I was disappointed with a lot of this film, it’s still a nice idea and, like I said earlier, you expect anthology format kinds of films to be a bit hit and miss. This one is mainly miss for me but there were enough interesting spins on old classics to keep me interested... once I’d gotten past the first quarter of an hour. Due to the nature of the beast, I can’t say it’s not worth watching because I expect everyone is going to have their own specific hits and misses among this lot so, if you’re a fan of horror, and found footage shaky cam horror in particular, then you could do a lot worse than to spend an evening in with this movie, of you can rustle up a cheap copy. I’ll certainly be checking out the sequels at some point... when the price is right.