The Night House (2020)

directed by David Bruckner

USA

107 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Being "about grief" has of late become somewhat of a buzzword in horror; such-and-such film being "about grief" is usually a way that people describe something when they want to make it clear that it's not like those other horror films, the supposedly brainless ones that don't contemplate anything or have any deeper meaning. It's almost like the term "elevated horror": branding something as "about grief" makes it okay for us to enjoy it as Serious Film Watchers. I'm not here to argue about whether any specific movie itself is about grief, because that can be personal on the part of both the filmmaker and those who choose to view a film through that lens. I'm specifically talking about the act of applying a label to a horror movie that is intended to separate it from the rest of the genre as if the genre is shameful to be part of.

With that out of the way, The Night House is about grief. It's explicitly about grief in every inch of itself - every inch that isn't about self-loathing of the kind that gets into your brain and convinces you that nothing matters. This is a very subtle movie that doesn't seem like much until you've sat with it for a minute, and it's certainly not something that a lot of people are going to be willing to accept as a horror movie. But the horror genre, to me at least, has always been about catharsis, and catharsis is what The Night House feels like, in the end.

"House horror" is one of the most prevalent subcategories of the genre, so much so that I feel a little silly even calling it A Thing when it's so widespread and hard to pin down. But by "house horror" I mean movies that involve the house as a character or an integral part of the plot, not just movies that start out when Becky and her five kids move into a huge new-construction house that turns out to have a ghoul in the basement. The house is literally a character in The Night House - or possibly there's a character in the house. Part of what made this movie so enthralling to me is that I've never really seen any film deal with the feeling of seeing yourself from the outside: the feeling of "That's my house, but I'm not home." These feelings aren't the central story, but are used as kind of a motif and are incredibly important to the bigger picture. The construction of a house and then a house to mirror that house, and then taking that further - a person to mirror a person - are acts carried out as sacrifice to maybe the most nebulous concept I've ever seen a movie try to personify. While this film is subtle, it's also extremely ambitious. It has the air of something that a writer or filmmaker would have had dwelling on their mind for years, a pet obsession, something they were personally interested in. The very light touches of the occult speak more of somebody who's done research and cares about the subject - it didn't feel like that side of the film was so scarce because of inexperience, it felt like a deliberate choice to only scratch the surface and leave the viewer feeling haunted.

I apologize if I'm being vague, but I knew nothing whatsoever about this movie before going into it, and I think that's far and away the best way to experience it. The only drawback to that is that you might get tricked by the film's subdued tone and what, at first, seems like a fairly routine set-up for a horror movie: Grieving woman remains in a house filled with memories of her deceased partner, begins experiencing bizarre supernatural events. Like I said, you have to kind of let this one ride out and not try to guess too hard where it's going, because you most likely won't be able to if you've kept yourself away from spoilers. Its masterful storytelling is almost the best part of it, how it starts at such a familiar and easy jumping-off point but evolves and branches out into strange directions until the end result is something so singular that it feels entirely different from where it began.

Without saying too much, I want to bring up the ending, because it hit me out of nowhere and has been staying with me since I saw the film. Up until then I was invested in it as an outsider, finding it riveting and conceptually fascinating as well as aesthetically pleasing, but something about that ending was personal. Something about that hit me in a deep place. Like I said, this is about grief, but not just for someone else. It's about carrying a burden within you that tells you you don't matter, and what that can do to you if you've had it your whole life. You're used to the focus being solely on the main character's wish to be reunited with their dead partner in movies like this, and that's why it's surprising when The Night House, somewhat unexpectedly, turns a mirror on the protagonist's own unaddressed self-image. The main character in that boat at the end being confronted with the seductive voice of her own apathy, being told that nothing has any meaning - or that nothing is the only meaning there is - and then making the conscious decision not to listen... that felt really real. I don't know how a movie with a relatively simple premise such as this one managed to transform itself into something resonant. There's a lot to unpack from this seemingly straightforward film.