In The Night House, Beth (played by Godzilla vs. Kong/Iron Man 3's Rebecca Hall) is dealing with her husband's death, and soon weird, creepy stuff starts happening at their house.
This is one of those movies that is competently made but is unable to quite make the landing. The basic gist of the story is fairly good. I appreciate that this movie looks like it's doing something that has been done before in other films but manages to shake things up a bit. The third act really works and the ending leaves an impression. Plus, there is some really next-level haunting imagery, some of the best I've seen in a while.
Buuuuuutttt... The first two acts are too slow. This is an hour and forty-eight minutes, but feels a lot longer. Much of this is Beth investigating her husband and the house and occasionally discussing things with others. These sort of investigative-type movies can work (What Lies Beneath being a good example), but they have to be paced well or at least do things in an attention-keeping manner. This lacks that. There are also moments where the dialogue doesn't feel natural. I know Beth is suffering from grief, pain, and depression, but man does the script make her MEGA touchy and combative at times. Though, I got to give Rebecca Hall credit: she does a good job of making the character work and elevating the dialogue.
In fact, the whole cast does a surprisingly good job with what they had to work with. The best performance may be Chicago Hope's Vondie Curtis-Hall as a concerned neighbor of Beth.
This is not a must-see, but the when the movie works, it really works and like I said there's some great imagery in this. I can see some people getting a higher mileage out of this than I.
No comments:
Post a Comment