--Beth, The Night House
Rebecca Hall shines very brightly in one of 2021's best films because of her superb leading performance with all of its nuance, authenticity, and intensity. The Night House illustrates how glances, expressions, and other bodily movements can express such strong emotions as penetrating grief better than scores of subpar dialogue ever could. It also does belong alongside the likes of The VVitch, The Invisible Man (2020), Antlers, and other recent theme or character-driven horror movies even if it is not as stylistically unique as them. Without ever having more than perhaps a couple of jumpscares and without sacrificing intellectual sincerity for emotional depth or vice versa, The Night House is a triumph for storytelling and not just for Rebecca Hall as an actress.
Production Values
Darkness, the color red, and the color blue dominate a handful of excellent shots each in ways connected to the movie's central locations and plot. Though this is a psychological, supernatural horror film, CGI-heavy scenes are not part of the foundation. There is just more of an emphasis on Rebecca Hall's Beth than on cinematography or even the extended cast. This is indeed a much better showcasing of Rebecca Hall's talent than Iron Man 3 or Godzilla vs Kong. The way that she looks at the empty other half of the bed or lashes out at someone else to convey the sadness of losing a spouse is both subtle and very strong. The way her mannerisms convey the sharply conflicting feelings she has as a woman who fiercely misses her husband and yet increasingly suspects him of infidelity and beyond is a thing of great skill. As the writing and her acting have a synergistic effect, something seemingly small from earlier in the film becomes a major factor and Hall's emotional journey becomes more and more conflicted. Mostly there to further Hall's character trajectory, Sarah Goldberg and Vondie Curtis-Hall do justice to their supporting roles as well. For the most part, there are only a few scenes that even feature characters other than these three, and Hall has far more scenes to herself than she does with Goldberg and Curtis-Hall. The Night House belongs to Rebecca Hall, and the film is all the better for it.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
The sudden suicide of Beth's husband Owen shatters her. Consumed by grief and a desire to connect with memories, she watches old tapes of the couple. Eventually she looks at some of his old drawings for the house he built for them and notices strange comments and designs in a floorplan sketchbook. She shortly after receives a phone call supposedly from Owen's number amidst unusual phenomena but continues to wake up on the floor (with no texts appearing on her phone or her late husband's phone). Possible evidence of an affair surfaces, and clues pointing to more sinister activities emerge too.
Intellectual Content
All consciousness is immaterial even if it is metaphysically brought into existence and sustained by arrangements of physical matter, and anything immaterial is not part of nature even if it causally interacts with (as with consciousness) or metaphysically governs the natural world (as with the laws of logic), so all psychological phenomena are in one sense supernatural even if they do not involve deities, ghosts, or demons. In fact, the very distinction between hallucinations, whether they are of supernatural phenomena or something else, and external objects means that hallucinations must occur within a mind, having nothing to do with the external world of matter and all mental states are thus supernatural--though anyone can know that consciousness is by logical necessity immaterial without thinking about the fallibility of sensory perceptions in accessing the external world in this way. All it takes is recognition of the intangible nature of consciousness and the logical possibility of a mind without a body. In The Night House, the overlap between psychological horror and supernatural horror is on display, and an early scene where Beth mentions how she died for four minutes and was greeted by nothingness ironically depends on this.
Her nonphysical consciousness would have to exist past the death of her body for her to even have truly perceived this void of an afterlife, and of course the laws of logic would exist by pure necessity as immaterial truths that cannot not exist, rendering total nothingness logically impossible, but neither the character nor the actress has probably ever once realized this. There would have to be an afterlife to even perceive post-mortem "nothingness," which would at most be a void of certain external environments or beings that is not true nothingness at all, or else no one could perceive this supposed nothingness! She seems to mean that there is no spiritual or physical landscape she found herself in. Now, she could have misremembered, for even having a seeming experience with an afterlife would not prove that there is an afterlife, just as the inverse is true about literally dying, coming back to life, and having the perception that there is/was not afterlife; as it turns out, a supernatural entity who calls itself "Nothing" has longed to reclaim Beth ever since she died and was resuscitated in her youth. It is unclear if this being is a malevolent uncaused cause or a lone demonic entity, but either way, it is presented as if it can reveal itself to people's perceptions at will by appearing to and transcending the sensory world. This personification of Nothing is a very unique take on the contents of the afterlife even if that makes the afterlife of the film much more complicated than many viewers might realize. Even aside from the necessary existence of logical truths making nothingness impossible and the fact that if Beth perceived nothing when dead, that means she existed and thus there was another something that was there, there is the fact that a being called Nothing really is something, so the name conveys an absence of joy in this afterlife and not true nothingness.
Conclusion
Creative, wonderfully acted, and simultaneously abstract and emotionally deep, The Night House is like the serpentine sketches of Beth's dead husband in that it is not quite as simple as it might first appear. With subject matter spanning grief and deception and an afterlife and the nature of nothingness itself (which is, as was just explained, not true nothingness because absolute nothingness is impossible with or without the afterlife of the film), here is a masterful take on how to put mystery into a story and then go in a clever, unusual direction. Rebecca Hall accomplished something incredible with her performance as well, carrying the film with sometimes nothing more than facial expressions and gestures. One of the best horror films and general movies of its entire release year, The Night House is a monument to what can be done with a small cast and a very personal but philosophically weighty premise.
Content:
1. Violence: A few shots show someone attacking or killing other people.
2. Profanity: Words like "Fucking," "bullshit," and "goddamn" are periodically used.
3. Nudity: Beth's deceased husband Owen is seen standing from behind fully nude early on.
No comments:
Post a Comment