A House on the Bayou (2021)
(On Cable TV, September 2022) I wasn’t expecting much of A House on the Bayou, and that may explain why I’m so pleased with it. It doesn’t start on a particularly promising note, as a warring couple (he got caught cheating; she won’t divorce him but she won’t make life easy for him) head out to a vacation retreat with their teenage daughter. Plenty of horror thrillers have started on that note (most recently: You Should have Left) and there’s scant reason to believe that we’ll get anything different than the usual haunted house story. But then things get creepy: A trip to the grocery store mixes marital lies, hillbilly horror and ominous warnings. Two uninvited guests show up for supper, but they seem to know things that they should not. As further revelations pile up (and some of them are great fun!), the film does this little Todorovian dance between the real and the supernatural, going back and forth several times between otherworldly and twisted psychological explanations for what’s going on. The resolution is not bad, albeit not necessarily as strong as it could have been. A House on the Bayou, a lower-profile made-for-TV Blumhouse production, is rather well-executed on a technical level: The Louisiana bayou is suitably moody, production values are up to the requirements of the plot, and the actors do fine. Paul Schneider is fine in a role that morally bounces back and forth, but the women have more fun: It’s very entertaining to see the striking Angela Sarafyan in a meatier role than usual, Lia McHugh is good as the teenager stuck in the middle of her parents’ warfare and Lauren Richards is lovely in a small but pivotal role. I’m not sure if A House on the Bayou is all that good (and I’d like a break from the “all of the male characters are terrible people” cliché), but it’s plot-heavy in a way that horror films usually aren’t, and writer-director Alex McAulay’s twists are fun to follow to the creepy end. Not bad, especially if your expectations are low in the first place.