The Night House

Year of Release:  2021

Director:  David Bruckner

Screenplay:  Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski

Starring:  Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Evan Jonigkeit, Stacy Martin, Vondie Cutis Hall

Running Time:  110 minutes

Genre:  Horror

Following the death of her husband Owen by suicide, Beth (Hall) is left alone in their large lakeshore house trying to put her life back together again.  As she organises her husband's possessions, Beth finds herself haunted by strange dreams, from which she wakes in different parts of the house to where she went to sleep. The drams lead to clues that Owen had been leading a secret double life.  As strange phenomenon increase, Beth becomes convinced that she is being haunted, and not just by her husband.

This is a dark, sombre supernatural mystery.  For the most part it is a slow burning, genuinely creepy, intelligent ghost story, with an intriguing mystery, however in the last twenty minutes or so it falls into more conventional horror movie territory, which while it does have some good chills, feels slightly disappointing compared to what has gone before.  The film is elevated by a fantastic performance by Rebecca Hall who is in almost every scene, and often on her own.  She gives a brittle performance as the recently widowed Beth, and doesn't really soften the edges, as she pushes away friends and family who try to reach out to her, and the mixture of grief and rage is never far from the surface, mixed with her increasing obsession over the mystery of her husband's double life.  The film frequently features her alone in this vast, but very modern house, wreathed in shadows, where you glimpse furtive darker shadows among the shadows.  It may not stand up to scrutiny, but the mystery is an involving one.  This is an above average creepy tale, which does let itself down a bit in the last twenty minutes or so, which rushes to answer all the questions, and falls victim to some silly plot contrivances, however it does have some effective special effects work, and even if the finale is a little disappointing, by then we are too involved in Beth's story not to feel invested.

Rebecca Hall in The Night House

The Ritual

Year of Release:  2017
Director:  David Bruckner
Screenplay:  Joe Barton, based on the novel The Ritual by Adam Nevill
Starring:  Rafe Spall, Robert James-Collier, Arsher Ali, Sam Troughton
Running Time:  94 minutes
Genre:  Horror

Five middle-aged friends, Luke (Spall), Hutch (James-Collier), Phil (Ali), Dom (Troughton) and Rob (Paul Reid), meet up in a London pub to plan a guy's holiday.  Immediately afterwards Rob is killed in a liquor store robbery.  Six months later, the other four friends are on a hiking holiday in Sweden, partly as a tribute to Rob.  However, the group are unprepared and inexperienced with wilderness survival.  As tempers fray, the weather takes a turn for the worse and one of the group suffers a twisted ankle.  The guys decide that, instead of continuing with their planned two day hike, they will take a shortcut through a thick, dark forest.  Now, anyone who has ever seen a horror film knows that this is a big mistake.  The men soon realise their mistake when they get hopelessly lost and discover a freshly killed animal carcass suspended in the trees, and strange runic markings carved into the tree trunks.  Spending the night in a run-down cabin in the forest makes the bad situation a whole lot worse.

Based on a successful novel from British horror author Adam Nevill, this film never really works, mainly because the four central characters are all pretty unlikeable.  There isn't much backstory given to them, and they spend most of their time bickering and trading apparently jokey insults at each other, but it is hard to see how they became friends in the first place, because most of the time they don't even seem to like each other.  It does have something to say about how men find it so difficult to open up about their problems and anxieties even among their closest friends, and also how male friendship often works, with an apparent superficial, light and sometimes almost cruel surface, but with a lot of deeper undercurrents hidden beneath it all.  It also deals with the very real but inevitable horror of simply getting older.  It's worth pointing out that this is almost an entirely male film, the only women on screen appear very briefly towards the end.  After a brutal pre-credits robbery sequence, the film moves into a quieter tone of a Blair Witch-style lost in the woods film, until kicking into high gear for the climax.  The thing that stalks the group is mostly hidden, you hear it's roars and see the trees shaking, alongside the occasional dismembered corpses of it's victims strung up in the trees, with occasional half-seen glimpses of a large creature, until it's revealed in all it's CGI glory towards the end.  The climax feels kind of rushed.  It's not a very scary film, and it is kind of frustrating because despite some good sequences and ideas, the whole just didn't really work for me, and it felt like it should have been so much better.

From left to right:  Robert James-Collier, Rafe Spall, Asher Ali and Sam Troughton