The Night House (2020, David Bruckner) (Patreon)

70/100

Gauntlet thrown: This is not a horror movie, "elevated" or otherwise. Yes, a few scattered horror elements pop up, to the film's detriment; like Oculus, it's weakest when delivering obligatory conventional booga-booga, stuff that can be sold effectively in a trailer. But what starts out as the most ferocious portrait of raw grief since Truly Madly Deeply metamorphoses into an anti-messianic mirror image of Donnie Darko, complete with elaborate occult mythology (which thankfully proves to be all but meaningless here; I do not anticipate an expository director's cut) and strategic incoherence. The film's all suffocating nihilistic mood, anchored by Rebecca Hall's truly lacerating turn as a woman for whom her husband's inexplicable suicide can only make sense if she's the one responsible for it—if her own sublimated death wish wields such infectious power that it created a parallel existence involving sacrificial lookalikes. Can I connect every dot of that thesis w/r/t what happens onscreen? Is it clear in hindsight which narrative aspects have some basis in objective reality, based on people other than Beth (e.g. Stacy Martin's bookstore clerk) experiencing them? No on both counts, but that slight fuzziness works to the film's benefit, especially relative to the unmistakable therapeutic controlling metaphor of, say, The Babadook (which I did like but complained "practically writes its own doctoral thesis"). Mostly, though, I'd recommend this just for the sheer pleasure of watching Hall slice and dice her way through pretty much the entire supporting cast, in a context less troubling and more evocative than that of Christine (with which The Night House shares a great deal of self-negation DNA, come to think of it; Beth's like a Christine who found happiness and then saw it abruptly, capriciously, incomprehensibly revoked). Honestly, I would trade this year's entire slate of Oscar-nominated performances, across all four categories, for the contemporaneously hilarious, retroactively revealing three-minute scene of Beth fending off a helicopter mom.

"So yeah. Yeah. If you want to know. He took the boat out on the lake, he took a handgun that I didn't even know that we owned, and pow: right in the mouth. So. Which Hunter got what grade on what high school elective speech-class assignment really doesn't matter to me right now. So you want a B? You got a B."

"I...I apologize..."

"Oh, you want an A? All right. [taps key with enough force to stun a rhino] Ta da!"