Review: Rebecca Hall keeps the tension building in 'The Night House'

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Hall plays a woman literally haunted by her husband’s mysterious suicide in David Bruckner’s well-crafted supernatural thriller.

The scariest moments in “The Night House,” an elegant nerve-jangler about the sometimes lethal cost of waterfront real estate, are marvels of jump-scare engineering. They’re shivery little reminders of what can happen when ominous music, assaultive sound design and serpentine camera moves are flexed to the state-of-the-art max. I’m as weary of cheap jolts as the next horror fan, but the jolts in this movie don’t feel cheap; if anything, they feel curiously plush, even luxuriant.

You suspect that Beth didn’t suffer fools gladly when her husband was alive, and she suffers them even less gladly now. In one juicy early scene she has a meeting at school with a parent, one of those entitled busybodies who’s chosen the worst possible day to try and bump up her kid’s grade. After a few minutes of passive-aggressive negotiation, Beth calmly announces, “My husband shot himself,” taking a cold, mirthless delight in the woman’s shock and shame as the details come spilling out.

The puzzle may ultimately be less than the sum of its intricately ludicrous parts, and its attempts to merge grief and horror — to show them as flipsides of the same emotional coin — pales beside a thematically similar thriller such asStill, it’s hard not to appreciate the unique care with which Bruckner and the writers have worked out their story.

 

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