The Night House

Rebecca Hall carrying a film about grief with the best use of negative space in recent horror.

A widowed teacher is alone in the lake house her architect husband built, going through his things after a suicide she did not see coming. The house has a mirror image of itself across the water, built in reverse.

David Bruckner hides figures in the geometry of the rooms: shapes that resolve into a person if you look at the doorframe rather than at the doorway, and several of them are visible only on a second viewing.

Hall plays Beth as furious rather than sad, drinking through a dinner party and saying the unforgivable thing, and the performance is why the film works at all.

The explanation in the last act is weaker than the dread. The first hour is exceptional.