The Night House: Dark Places

Ghost stories can be hard, haunted house stories can be hard, simply because there are so damn many of them. It’s tough to really do anything new with them because somebody, somewhere, has more likely than not assayed that territory already. It’s one of the oldest forms of horror there is, as soon as we had dwellings and communities we had the potential for stories about the long-passed people who once inhabited them. Hell, maybe even before that, I’m no anthropologist. The point is that it’s hard to do new stuff with ghosts, and so a lot of people don’t even try. Instead they just set up the location, insert some interchangeable characters, arrange some jump scares, and as often as not, make bank.

Which is probably a big part of why I’m still thinking about The Night House a few days after watching it. It’s a thoughtful and effective (albeit uneven) story about grief and the things we keep secret, and it manages to give one of the oldest stories in town some real heft and substance along the way.

It begins with a series of placid exterior and interior shots of a lovely modern lakeside home. There’s a boat bobbing gently in the water next to a dock, wind chimes clink in the breeze, Inside, the house is still, empty. It’s captured in the middle of everyday life, glasses sitting on a nightstand, pictures of a couple, pictures of friends and family. A home office, filled with drafting equipment. No sudden blaring shock disturbs it. Nothing sinister, nothing ominous. It’s just quiet. And then two women walk up to the front door, glimpsed from inside the house. There are murmured sympathies and reassurances, expressions of polite gratitude. One woman walks into the house while the other leaves.

The woman who walks into the house is Beth Parchin, and she’s just come back from a funeral. Her husband Owen has passed away suddenly, and Beth is left to try and pick up the pieces. He was an architect, he designed their home, and by all accounts he loved Beth very much. And Beth loved him. So we’re introduced to her at the moment when all of the well-meaning, sympathetic people have fallen away and it is just her in their house, without him.

And then she hears the footsteps upstairs, sees the muddy footprints that come right up to the front door.

In Owen’s absence, Beth finds herself beset by vivid nightmares that she finds hard to separate from waking life, and she’s started sleepwalking. She’s hearing someone in the house when she’s alone, and the circumstances around his death are leading her to wonder who her husband really was. She starts piecing the Owen she didn’t know together from his books, his diaries, the files on his computer and on his phone. And the longer she looks, the stranger it gets. This is the kind of film that might be called “stylish,” because a lot of it takes place in lovely modern interiors that don’t seem especially foreboding. Even nighttime exteriors in spooky forest settings are spooky forest settings at the edge of a pretty lake in upstate New York. And I appreciate the departure from cliché. It’s always nice to see a haunted house story where the house doesn’t look like the kind of place that’d be haunted, because there’s something so much more unnerving about ghosts in a place that looks like where we might live.

But it’s not just a modern take on a stock ghost story, at its heart there’s a strong commitment to exploring the emotional aftermath of someone’s death, and the idea that maybe we didn’t know that person as well as we thought. That there were other sides to them. It’s told with a strong use of silence and empty spaces, putting the idea of absence at the center of the film, and uses distortions of place and shape to communicate not just emotional states but also the supernatural in terms of absence and emptiness. Parallels and mirror images are a big part of the story too, which makes sense because in the wake of an unexplained death, the familiar can become strange, and that strangeness only deepens the more Beth explores what her husband’s life was like in the spaces she never knew about. So in some ways, that idea that we don’t ever truly know one another, no matter how intimate our relationship, is turned into something bigger and darker but does so in a way that isn’t necessarily obvious. It’s a ghost story, and it’s not not a ghost story, but that’s not where it ends, and it’s the story of someone who was keeping a dark secret, and it’s not not that story, but the secret both is and isn’t what you think it is. And it’s a story where the antagonist is something both literal and metaphoric, a fable about unresolved trauma and grief like The Babadook (though it’s really nothing like it otherwise and The Babadook is still easily the superior film overall). We experience Beth’s grief as grief and as something worse, more monstrous, as profound grief can often be. A grief that is taking form and pushing its way into our world.

The filmmaker’s approach is a very restrained one, and I think it works well, especially when so many mass-market horror films distributed by big studios go big and noisy and as obvious as possible. The palette is full of muted colors - this is mostly a tastefully earth-toned film - even in exteriors that are somewhat overcast without being brooding. It’s a surprisingly warm film visually, given the subject matter, and again, I think this works because it contrasts with the supernatural elements. This is someone’s home, and there’s something very wrong here. The score (where there is any, like I said, this is a film that uses silence a lot) is mostly ambience with the occasional sting and a well-deployed use of Richard and Linda Thompson’s “The Calvary Cross” as a leitmotif that brings grief and horror together. The dialogue is a little stagey in places, but strong performances across the board go a long way toward smoothing that over. Beth is especially well-realized as someone whose sorrow is matched only by her rage, and both shine through incandescently .She is not handling any of this well, she is lashing out and falling apart. On balance, she’s not even sympathetic in places but she’s absolutely raw and present throughout. And in the face of someone who feels totally alone, the importance of relationships and connection is made clear with the people around her, providing something of a lifeline for Beth as things get much worse. There’s anger, there’s pain, there’s sadness, there’s loss, and all of it to a degree that feels barely containable without being histrionic or exaggerated.

But it is uneven, and in the middle of a lot of good, thoughtful, substantial work there are moments that are entirely too conventional. The first act leans a little too much into what film critic Mark Kermode would call “quiet-quiet-quiet-quiet-BANG!” filmmaking, not quite to the point of gratuitous jump scares, but things happen suddenly with sharp musical stings a little too often in spots where letting something unfold quietly in the background would have elicited more dread. And in the third act, the climax lays everything out a little too plainly, especially considering how much of it an attentive viewer has already put together at that point. It’s always annoying when a filmmaker doesn’t trust their audience to put two and two together. But none of this really fucks anything important up and it ends on a nice, uneasy note that manages to be both cathartic and sinister, avoiding a pat ending without feeling like sequel bait. We all have dark places we don’t like to go, this film says, but they are always there, and sometimes we have to.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu