"You were right. There is nothing. Nothing is after you. You’re safe now."
"All houses wherein men have lived and died are haunted houses. Through the open doors the harmless phantoms on their errands glide, with feet that make no sound upon the floors. We meet them at the doorway, on the stair, along the passages they come and go. Impalpable impressions on the air, a sense of something moving to and fro."
-– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Haunted Houses"
Beth Parchin (Rebecca Hall) just lost her husband Owen (Evan Jongkeit) to suicide. As she spirals into grief, she stays at their lake house, where she discovers Owen's ominous secrets that may be linked to his many pictures of brunette women that look like Beth and a mysterious spirit in the house.
The film, written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski and directed by David Bruckner, premiered at Sundance in January 2020, but was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and it ultimately released in August 2021.
Previews: Trailer 1
, Trailer 2.
The Night House contains examples of:
- And Starring: Vondie Curtis-Hall (Mel) gets the "and" credit.
- Anti-Villain: Owen turns out to have been this. He was a Serial Killer, but his motivation was to protect the woman he loved from death.
- Arc Words: A single word: "Nothing."
- Balancing Death's Books: What the Nothing wanted. After Beth was declared technically dead in a car accident, the Nothing stalked her and tried to spur Owen into killing her. He loved her too much to do it and tried to trick The Nothing into thinking the books were balanced by killing other women who looked like her.
- Convenient Photograph: If Owen hadn't photographed all the women he was stalking, Beth may never have gone looking for his secrets and found the other house.
- Demonic Possession: Owen was possessed by "The Nothing" and killed women to keep it at bay by tricking him into thinking he finally got Beth. When he was getting too powerful, Owen took his own life to keep it away.
- Driven to Suicide: Owen shot himself rather than give into the demon.
- Drowning My Sorrows: Beth unsurprisingly drinks herself to sleep every night to cope with Owen's death.
- Has a Type: Owen has numerous creepy photographs of brunette women he was stalking, all of whom look like Beth. This turns out to have been intentional as he was trying to satisfy the demon.
- Exact Words: Owen's suicide letter says that there is nothing, and that nothing after Beth. The demon after her identifies itself as "Nothing".
- Living Shadow: The Demon often takes Owen's forms, but it is just as likely to be shown as a shadowy, see-through figure.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: While there is definitely a demon out stalking Beth and Owen in the past, a lot of the movie is left open to interpretation, such as whether Owen was really there on the lake when Beth saw him.
- Mistaken for Cheating: Both Beth and Mel draw the understandable conclusion that Owen was cheating on her. The truth is a lot worse.
- Moral Myopia: Owen loved Beth too much to kill her. Shame about the other women.
- The Nothing After Death: Beth says that she saw "nothing" when she died, and this is essentially the central idea of the movie, that Beth is being followed by a demon called "the Nothing."
- Plot-Triggering Death: Owen's suicide.
- The Pursuing Nightmare: Beth finds creeper shots taken by her husband, Owen, of a woman who looks just like her. She tracks the woman, Madelyne down, and it's revealed that Owen was ostensibly thinking about an affair. Only he wasn't - he was tracking the women to bring them to the house and kill them. Beth freaks out Madelyne, but she eventually tells Beth a story that, the night before, she dreamed of Beth (who was her) and someone was chasing them."I dreamed I was you. Well, I was me, but I was you too. And something was chasing you. Me.""Well, did it get us?"
- Serial Killer: Owen murdered several women who look like Beth to try and appease the demon.
- Starts with a Suicide: Owen has committed suicide when the story opens, with Beth finding his mysterious note.
- Symbolic Glass House: The house that gives the film its title is a huge, all-windows lakeside property where the protagonist Beth collapses after her husband mysteriously committed suicide there. And also where he murdered numerous women. And there's the other house, which looks exactly the same (but is not complete yet).
- Token Black Friend: Beth has one black friend, Heather, who appears for a couple of scenes. However, she also has a black neighbor who appears in even more scenes and acts to reciprocate the kindness she and Owen had shown to him when his wife died.
- Twisted Christmas: One vignette shows Owen cradling Beth beside a Christmas tree when he moves to strangle her. He then stops and appears to decide to kill other women to make the urge go away.
- Visible Victimology: Reconstructed, and justified. When Beth finds a picture of a tall, thin woman with long, straight brown hair, she assumes that her husband Owen was having an affair and has a standard physical type along the lines of Has a Type. Then it turns out that he's a Serial Killer who murdered multiple women with long dark hair, but the intended purpose was to keep the "Nothing", the malignant entity that stalked Beth, at bay by tricking it into believing it was her.
- Wham Line: "No, I'm not Owen."
