The Night House (2020)

(On Cable TV, June 2022) As a movie reviewer, I don’t often play the ”Totally saw the ending coming!” card. It’s cheap, it undermines my conviction that execution trumps concept, and most movies are predictable anyway. But once in a while, there comes a film that really annoys me in trying to set up an absurdly predictable mystery, then wanting us to act surprised when it reveals its twist. This is all the more regrettable in that I went into The Night House with the best of intentions – if nothing else, it stars Rebecca Hall, one of the most intriguing actresses in the business today. It starts on a pleasantly mysterious note, as a teacher grieving her dead husband discovers that he harboured dark secrets. By the turn of the second act, however, the film tips its hand too obviously, and the true nature of the dead husband’s actions becomes crystal clear… to everyone except the oblivious heroine spending the next hour chasing down a patently false path. The low density of plotting doesn’t help matters, as the film is slow enough to allow viewers to measure each new “revelation” against what we know will suspect. That quickly becomes the film’s second problem, because The Night House has a bad case of protagonist-centred morality that is punctured by anticipating the ending. To put it bluntly and with spoilers, her dead husband may have had the best intentions at heart for her, but he’s still a mass murderer and the film is too consumed by the revelation of his love for her that it skims over the most damning bit. Each good facet of the film (such as some intriguing work with silhouettes emerging from specific camera angles) either becomes overused or is balanced by some deeply dumb stuff (such as a mistress seeking out the wife). The deathly dull pacing further compounds the film’s other issues, and the ending really isn’t as effective as it thinks it is. In the end, director David Bruckner’s The Night House is a dud. An occasionally ambitious, intermittently effective one (largely thanks to Hall’s typically good performance) but a dud nonetheless. I shouldn’t have been this way, but the intense predictability of its “twist” undermines it and then the interminable pacing finishes it off.