The Night House

[Keebleman]

New horror movie with Rebecca Hall as a young widow dealing with the immediate aftermath of her husband's suicide.  She carries on living in the lakeshore house that he built himself, but she senses he is still around, or something is around anyway, something that really likes Richard and Linda Thompson's "I Want To See the Bright Lights Tonight" album.

Hall is great as always, and in its early stages the film feels as if it is going to be something quite substantial, but those hopes drift away.  The scares, though occasionally effective, are conventional and the resolution, as with so many horrors, makes little sense even on its own terms. 

The film makes a mistake in that we never get a sense of what the couple's married life was like.  In fact we get almost no clue as to the main character's past at all.  We know she's a teacher but we learn nothing about her family.  You'd think that, with her barely a week into her widowhood, they'd at least still be in touch, checking she's ok, but there's no-one except for a couple of colleagues and a neighbour, and the absence isn't explained.  And the house itself, so crucial to the story, should be strongly established as a character in its own right, comfortable and comforting at first but gradually becoming more and more sinister, but that doesn't happen.  It's just a building.

But it is interesting to learn that, in the world of the film anyway,

Spoiler alert

Death is thick as shit

[close]

.

[GoblinAhFuckScary]

another rebecca hall suicide movie! not sure if it's remotely similar but your post is giving me personal shopper vibes

[Keebleman]

Haven't seen that but it was mentioned on The Next Picture Show podcast as having some similarities with this film.