Searchlight bought “The Night House” for $12 million at Sundance 2020, a supernatural mystery that falls flat on the ground the minute you realize where it’s going. Director David Bruckner (The Ritual) casts Rebecca Hall as a teacher whose husband commits suicide and then, possibly, starts haunting their scenic lakehouse; lights flicker, and the stereo turns on and blasts music in the middle of the night. Instead of coming back to the big city, she dubiously decides to stay, which is when things get worse. Against the advice of her friends, she begins digging into her husband’s belongings, yearning for answers, and finds the pent-up secrets he kept from her. Bruckner shoots “The Night House” in an atmospherically slick fashion, but the scares aren’t there — Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski’s clunky screenplay resorts to too many loud jump scares. It’s a real shame since Hall delivers an exceptional performance as a grieving woman caught up in two alternate realities. But her talents can only do so much, especially when familiar horror tropes quickly start to spread throughout the narrative.
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The theatrical version runs 108 minutes, so we're talking a nearly 2-hour-10-minute cut of a movie that works because it's lean, and I'm not sure anyone needs that.