The Night House (David Bruckner, 2021)

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DarkImbecile
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Joined: Mon Dec 09, 2013 6:24 pm
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The Night House (David Bruckner, 2021)

#1 Post by DarkImbecile » Fri Sep 17, 2021 12:15 am

I was happily surprised by David Bruckner's The Night House, a Sundance debut that ably balances creepy and melancholy while adding a couple of genuinely jump-worthy scares* to the emotionally fraught story of Rebecca Hall's search for the reasons behind her husband's unexpected suicide and the nature of the house he built for them. I'm already a big fan of Hall's, and her performance here did nothing to dissuade me from that opinion; she more than sells the psychological stress of her situation even before any supernatural elements begin to worm their way into the plot.

The film feels somewhat indebted to Mike Flanagan's recent features and the two Haunting series, but with a little more rawness and less rigorous control over performances and the camera, in ways that mostly worked for me; definitely recommended to fans of that type of emotion-forward horror. Not every swing it takes totally connects, but enough do that it feels satisfying both in delivering the shocks the genre demands while also offering a relatively mature examination of the tolls of depression, suicide, and secrets.

This is the only thing I've seen by Bruckner outside of one of the least-successful segments of the original V/H/S horror anthology, but he's apparently been given the reins of the new Hellraiser; can anyone vouch for his Netflix feature The Ritual from a few years ago?

*Caught this by myself in its last screening at one of my local theaters, and there's a moment about halfway in that lulled me into a false sense of complacency and then made me jump halfway out of my chair, which would have been embarrassing had there been anyone else nearby.

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brundlefly
Joined: Fri Jun 13, 2014 12:55 pm

Re: The Films of 2021

#2 Post by brundlefly » Fri Sep 17, 2021 4:15 am

DarkImbecile wrote:
Fri Sep 17, 2021 12:15 am

This is the only thing I've seen by Bruckner outside of one of the least-successful segments of the original V/H/S horror anthology, but he's apparently been given the reins of the new Hellraiser; can anyone vouch for his Netflix feature The Ritual from a few years ago?
Went back and forth on it. Sometimes it seemed special and enticingly underexplained, sometimes it just seemed to be parsing out too few ideas. Nifty monster, though, and it was decent enough that I am looking forward to The Night House.

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Persona
Joined: Wed Mar 07, 2018 1:16 pm

Re: The Films of 2021

#3 Post by Persona » Sat Sep 18, 2021 8:01 am

I agree. The Ritual has some incredibly effective moments and the monster is indelible, but somehow it doesn't quite add up. I think maybe because it is very much character-centered horror and the character work isn't quite strong enough to elevate the film on that level.

So it leaves me about 50% excited to see The Night House, ha.

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Mr Sausage
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:02 pm
Location: Canada

Re: The Films of 2021

#4 Post by Mr Sausage » Tue Jan 04, 2022 3:02 pm

Matt wrote:Her performance in The Night House was a flinty, abrasive marvel.
Thanks for pointing this movie out. I just watched it, and while it was terrific (and stressful!) as a horror movie, just on the back of Hall's performance I would've happily watched a low-key, uneventful drama about this woman's day-to-day managing of her grief.

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Matt
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 12:58 pm

Re: The Night House (David Bruckner, 2021)

#5 Post by Matt » Tue Jan 04, 2022 3:47 pm

That's just what I was saying to someone about it yesterday. I could have happily done without all the genre elements and just watched Hall's character alienating her friends and family with her grief.

Robert Chipeska
Joined: Fri Dec 03, 2021 11:53 pm

Re: The Night House (David Bruckner, 2021)

#6 Post by Robert Chipeska » Tue Jan 04, 2022 4:57 pm

I like Hall, but I also liked Catherine Keener at this relative stage of her career. But like Keener, Hall seems to be increasingly stuck playing glum, difficult, thoroughly unlikeable characters, to the point where it's obviously typecasting. I'd like to see Hall escape that route, if possible. I have no need for likeable characters, per se, but the dour, bitchy, however-justifiably angry characters in these small-budget films generally pander to the that type of audience, with their own hang-ups and little psychodramas (all the girls in the audience say YEAH when she's snide at her husbands affair! Suh-nap!) and it's tiring. Mix it up a little, ladies, let's see some range. And frankly, someone like Lili Taylor often plays similar roles but with a greater degree of depth and vulnerability. Or maybe she's just a better judge of scripts?

As for the film, agreed that the genre gimmicks were distracting from a potentially solid relationship/grief story. Don't know why so many middling directors are incapable of writing or recognizing good scripts about this stuff. Bergman (I know, a high standard) could make a simple conversation more terrifying than all the optical gimmicks and faux-metaphysics in this film.

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therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: The Night House (David Bruckner, 2021)

#7 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Apr 15, 2022 6:30 pm

After all the relatively consistent soft hype, unfortunately I thought this was just okay. It's a respectful-enough portrait of a woman processing grief I guess, but I was disappointed by how afraid the filmmakers were to engage with that frenzied unpredictable state on its terms. The script in particular keeps Hall's response at an overstated Psych101 level of vividly aggressive reactions to loss, orbiting around a single note and holding it there. Sure, she varies considerably around that pole, but I wish she was allowed to follow a chaotically nonlinear trajectory of labile expressiveness to that psychological chaos, which would have been riskier but more appropriate for the film's own exploration. I agree with DI about Hall, and she does her best with the limited cues for behavioral dispositions she's given, but this had all the makings of a great film and sadly took a safer route- not to mention one distracted by the horror plot instead of using it to prompt Hall to move through these messy stages of grief. The film seems to only exist for this exercise to happen, so it's a mystery why it's not really given room to breathe. Maybe I'm just being too hard on the film from a professional standpoint, but I've seen enough movies tackle this feeling very well and expose themselves vulnerably to the disorder of the mental state before, to the point where I'm sorry but Hall moving from cold assertiveness and demanding answers to crying about not knowing 'why' just reads as lazy and superficial writing to me. The direction is technically strong and there's a lot this film is doing right on its polished surface levels, but it just felt irritatingly cautious around what I thought it was setting out to accomplish and thus frustratingly emptier than its allegorical narrative promised.

However, I did think the film made an interesting point accidentally -there's no way anyone involved was conscious of this reading- that made me really appreciate its third-act horror reveal:
SpoilerShow
Hall, like many who have lost someone (particularly to suicide), is looking for something tangible, some reason, and when she actually gets said reason, it's both incredibly fantastical in a cathartically narcissistic way (of course my husband spent his life tormented, willing to kill others and himself for me, the center of his universe) and also anti-cathartic and repelling in how banal and uninteresting it all is. So the idea of actually achieving this 'answer' and having it be unsatisfactory for both the more mature egocentric part of her, as well as the younger, immature part that needs stimulation and desires the feeling of catharsis, is a nice affirmation that we don't actually crave the honest tangible answer we would get, even if it's as batshit as this one.

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