In the Flesh: The Night House (Patreon)

Raw-boned and vulnerable with her gangly frame and large, wet eyes, Rebecca Hall more closely echoes Shelly Duvall than does any other actress of her generation. After fifteen years of tedious costume dramas and paint-by-numbers horror slop, David Bruckner’s frightening but uneven The Night House finally gives her a chance to prove she has the chops to go along with her haunting looks. As the grief-stricken and recently widowed Beth, Hall is equal parts brutally glib and gutted. Like Duvall she has the gift of conveying subtle variations in terror using only her expression. Her large features hover between cartoonish and upsettingly hyperreal, and the slightest flicker of emotion plays with instant clarity in that uncanny space. Even hampered by a sometimes belabored script by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, who nonsensically position her as a high school teacher who dresses in thousand-dollar blouses and lives in a designer lakefront dream home, she can generate chemistry with empty air and react more convincingly to CGI scares than most people would to being chased by dobermans.

Not that the scares themselves are anything to sneeze at. Between Bruckner’s patient, watchful camera and cinematographer Elisha Christian’s subtle but deep color saturation, the titular house and its unnerving double are pregnant with impenetrable shadows and gorgeously framed deep-focus shots in which household decor outlines disturbing negative spaces. Aside from their incongruously upper-class tone, the sets are well-dressed and convincingly lived-in, the revelation of the unfinished mirror house genuinely disturbing. In this second-act reveal the film is at its richest point thematically, contrasting the emptiness of the domestic sphere with the forbidden urges and dark secrets of its implied double, a sort of shadow family unit or container for the most wretched aspects of human nature when they spill out of polite society.

Unfortunately, what we get instead is a metaphor for depression ripped right out of a one-page Twitter comic about learning to live with one’s mental illness personified as a little black cloud. The film undercuts anything interesting it might have done in favor of overexplaining the shakiest elements of its script, deflating its breathless tension and defanging the remainder of its scares. Even harrowing images like Beth levitating and folding in on herself while bathed in deep red light can’t overcome the tremendous loss of inertia that comes with labeling and giving a voice to the nameless dread at the heart of The Night House. In the cold light of day, it doesn’t seem too frightening at all.