Dir - David Bruckner
Overall: GOOD
Though imperfect in ways, The Night House is a largely gripping, psychological horror movie that subverts enough tropes along the way to forgive its narrative ambitiousness. A directorial follow-up to the also flawed yet particularly successful The Ritual from director David Bruckner, the film was written by frequent collaborators Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski. On paper, a number of typical ingredients are present; namely waking "nightmare within a nightmare" sequences and a central protagonist who is going through an enormously traumatic event which allows every other character to be concerned for her mental well-being when she describes the unexplainable occurrences that she has become privy to. Still, the execution is refreshing as the spooky moments are played for emotional effect while deliberately avoiding insulting jump scares or any other far over-played nonsense. Most important of all though is Rebecca Hall's outstanding performance as she perfectly manifests the utter frustration and confusion of a grieving widow. The story bites off a little more supernatural mumbo jumbo than it can chew, but its priorities are in the right place and it has a resonating quality that is admirable.
Dir - Aneesh Chaganty
Overall: MEH
The sophomore effort from director/co-writer Aneesh Chaganty is the Munchausen syndrome by proxy thriller Run, a partially effective if ultimately predicable one. While there is clearly some mysterious foul-play at hand, the audience will have an easy time putting the pieces together before the movie itself reveals all of its cards. So, an example of mind-blowing, narrative deception this assuredly is not. Chaganty plays with many familiar, Misery-style tropes, such as but not limited to the debilitating pills that the wheelchair-bound victim catches on to and secretly stops taking, their thwarted attempts at escape, being locked into rooms, and racing against their "just around the corner" captors in order to obtain information. The angle here though is that it is all played in a sincere, schlock-less fashion. While this does not garnish any excusable sympathy for Sarah Paulson's mentally-ill, manipulative caregiver, it does provide some psychological gray area to play around with for the overall extremities of narcissistic selflessness. Both Paulson and relative newcomer Kiera Allen as the dysfunctional mother/daughter combo are quite excellent, carrying the movie virtually unaided by any other performers. It does not quite elevate the derivative material and there are one or two conflicting blunders along the way, (including a mysterious clue dropped in a shower scene that has no payoff whatsoever and a campy tag at the end which clashes with the more plausible tone), but it is still impressively made.
Dir - David Prior
Overall: MEH
If someone wanted to know what an artsy version of offensively moronic teen horror garbage like The Bye Bye Man or Slender Man would look like, David Prior's big screen adaptation of Cullen Bunn and Vanesa R. Del Rey's graphic novel The Empty Man may partially satisfy such curiosity. An international co-production that was largely shot in South Africa, a finished cut of the film was rushed for test audiences who presumably hated it almost as much as a later, ninety minute edit that was pre-screened. The resulting two and a half hour release is a bloated mess as one could imagine, a movie that takes on the impossible task of making its cliche-ridden, on-paper laughable premise come off as profound. What the movie does do rather effectively is create a series of eerie set pieces that have a low-key approach which offers up a few jarring surprises even if pretty much all of the supernatural occurrences barely variate from the horror movie norm. In this regard, the derivative nature may have more to do with the source material than with Prior's less-hacky interpretation of it, a source materiel that has its own version of a "chosen one", a protagonist with no free will, a clandestine doomsday cult, Hollywood-moody teenagers that no actual teenagers ever behave like, a shadowy figure who arbitrarily messes with people, and various other "creepy for the sake of being creepy" moments. Its trippy intentions are in the right place, but it is ultimately rather futile to make whispery chanting, a skeleton stature encased in a cave wall, people blowing into bottles, and a ripped up teddy bear all that frightening.
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