The Night House is one of those films that disappoints not by being less interesting than I'd expected, but by being much more interesting than I'd expected, right up until it completely isn't. It's like expecting you'll get no action tonight and instead getting an aborted blowjob. Sure, you ahead of where you thought you would be pleasure-wise, but come on.
Spoilers below
I included kpkboogie99's tweet above because, while it's obviously not actually true, there's enough truth there to highlight what I'm going to be talking about. Horror with subtext is nothing new. Horror which feels so obliged to ensure a primary coherent subtext running throughtout, though? I think that's something different.
When it works, it works gloriously (Get Up, for instance). When it doesn't, there's a risk of total collapse. Insisting on parallels turns subtext and text like polarised lenses; if they're not lined up, nothing shines through.
There are plenty of 21st century horror films which have grappled with this, but the one that comes to mind most after watching The Night House is The Awakening. Maybe that's just because both star Rebecca Hall, but whatever the workings of my battered brain, there's a useful comparison to be made here. I'll try to keep this broad, because I think The Awakening is generally worth seeing if you haven't already, and I want to restrict my spoilers to the film I'm actually discussing. As briefly as possible, then, The Awakening completely put the wind up me until the exact point its supernatural presence stops being an inexplicable source of dread, and becomes a sympathetic component of the main character's tragic backstory. There is, perhaps, something clever in how it all fits together (though not half as clever as the film seems to think), but all the expertly-crafted atmosphere, all that the unbearable ratcheting of tension, evaporates within seconds as we're told "Actually, it's about the nature of loneliness and loss".
The Night House starts off being very clearly about loneliness and loss - specifically, how main character Beth deals with the sudden suicide of her husband, Owen. I've talked over at IDFC about how last year's events have me viewing stories involving grief very differently to in the past. What The Night House does extremely well with is the idea that grief is both an absence and a presence. The hole that used to be a person is an object, heavy and prickly and burning hot and impossible to shift. Like the centre of a vortex, there's nothing actually there, but it pulls at you constantly nevertheless.
And because the absence is a presence, you can't actually just find something to replace what's gone. Its own absence blocks the way. Throughout the movie Beth is very deliberately difficult with every person she knows, even while she seeks any kind of answers from them. This is a classic paradox of grief - simultaneously blaring "I AM VERY CLEARLY NOT OK" across all frequencies, while biting at every extended hand. But it's classic precisely because it's so common, and it's so common because the mistake involved is so easy to make. You think that just because someone needs help, they want you to offer it. You think the love offered is a poor substitute for what was lost, rather than a cruel mockery of it.
Needing people to know you're hurt isn't the same as wanting them to try and heal you. How dare they even try, frankly? You can't just stop needing what's gone because people are trying to offer you something else. It's not that being asked to include your friends in your grief is bad advice. It's that when something is an impossibility, every reminder that the impossible would help becomes indistinguishable from cruelty.
In the same scene where Beth attacks every attempt her colleagues make to engage her in conversation (though in fairness having one of them mansplain mental health and another keep judging her grief response clearly wasn't helping), Beth repeatedly tries to drink from her clearly empty glass. There's nothing there for her any more, but it doesn't occur to her to get another. The drink was the drink, and the fact she can't have more from it is completely irrelevant to the fact she must have more.
Just after this, Beth is taken home by her least-worst colleague Claire. Beth's first question upon getting into her house is whether Clare wants a brandy. Claire responds both that she doesn't want the drink, and that she doesn't think Beth should have one either.
Claire is a part of Beth's life separate from her husband. Brandy is a part of Owen's life. The unpalatality is of no consequence - this is about feeling closer to him by accepting the shittiness of who he was. See, you know, literally the entirety of the plot. When Beth objects to Claire's concerns about Owen's "pothumous right to privacy", she's very obviously misinterpreting what Claire actually said (which was more along the lines of "he's not here to provide the context that might stop your hypothesising about his secrets spiralling completely out of control). But this in itself is a reaction to Claire's own failure to grasp what's happening - to see Beth's digging as a way to separate herself from Owen, the way you try to distance yourself from an ex you're not over by finding as many different reasons to hate them as you can. This is something different (or maybe both are the same thing and equally misinterpreted). Beth isn't trying to distance herself from Owen by taking a machete to the undergrowth of his secret life. She's trying to make new connections in the only way left to her.
The reflection across the lake. An additional axis, of course, since water itself reflects.
And then it collapses into an overly serious Final Destination remake. The absent presence turns out to not stem from her husband's death, but be the cause of it. The
(I think a lot of this stems from the film thinking how the set-up of the suicide note gets a very clever pay-off. The film is wrong.)
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