David Bruckner

  • The Night House (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • The Signal (2007)

    The Signal (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2021) Even though there have been many, many horror movies about electronic signals turning people crazy, I still hold out hope that, some day, someone will manage to make a worthwhile movie out of it. Even after watching The Signal, I’m still waiting. A hodgepodge of ideas badly stuck together, it does have some residual interest… but it doesn’t take a long time for the usual horror silliness to undermine the ideas. In true genre fashion, writers-directors David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry seem more interested in gore and cheap scares than in exploring any of the ideas they may have started with. It doesn’t really help that the film is structured along three shorter films, and that much of the film focuses on TV signals, probably as a visual device. While the result is much narratively tighter than most anthology films, it’s still a disappointment. There is a good case to be made that the filmmakers were interested in showing people being violent to one another, and that the TV thing was just a thin justification on top of what they wanted to do anyway, and I’d go for that… except that stripped of its rationale, The Signal is another one of those cheap horror films that seem to find inherent worth in violence, which is where I disagree. Instead, it feels like so many forgettable films, the madness of its characters poorly motivated and ultimately leading to nothing but more red syrup spilling out. It’s striking that such a great idea, reflective of our ambivalent relationship with technology, hasn’t managed to produce at least one great horror film where the metaphor is made literal. Maybe some day…

  • The Ritual (2017)

    The Ritual (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, August 2018) Oh no, four guys go hiking in the woods in another country! Oh no, one of them gets injured! Oh no, they take a shortcut off the map! Oh no, they see weird things! Oh no, strange people surround them! Oh no, I don’t think this is going to end well! … that’s right, The Ritual is just about the most ordinary film about the most ordinary horror elements you can think of. Rafe Spall stars, David Bruckner directs and the audience endures. There’s a whole lot of nonsense in the film that makes it hard to care about any of it—the moment that hallucinations come into any horror movie, then it’s a free license for the filmmakers to do anything and everything, considerably lowering the stakes. A description of this film’s monster ends up causing a big “so what”. The Ritual isn’t that scary, isn’t that funny, isn’t that anything. It’s thoroughly mediocre in the most average sense of the word. I suppose it will do the trick for those looking for familiar thrills—I mean, it’s not that bad—, but it doesn’t really doesn’t go anywhere beyond that.