Loud jump-scares are high on the agenda of David Bruckner (The Ritual)’s small-scale but never dull psychological horror. Rebecca Hall is Beth, a teacher whose husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) took his own life, forcing her to live alone in a spooky secluded lakehouse that would look at home on Grand Designs. As with all modern Hollywood depictions of widowhood there’s booze (here it’s brandy) and a lot of clicking through old photos on a MacBook until Beth begins to experience some weird shit: thuds on the door, a naked phantom on the lake, AOR music blasting out in the middle of the night.
Bruckner’s filmmaking is elegant, imbuing the lakehouse with dread.
As Beth suspects she is being haunted by Owen — she also has the after-effects of a previous near-death experience to deal with — screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski throw in lots of oddball details from photos on Owen’s phone of a woman who looks just like Beth, a cryptic suicide note (“Nothing is after you”), a house over the lake that is a mirror image of her own, and a clutch of creepy-ass blueprints. Even on the paranormal terms of a ghost chiller, it is difficult to join-the dots.
But Bruckner’s filmmaking, save an over-use of BIG sound effects to create shocks, is elegant, imbuing the lakehouse with dread, while Hall – a genre stalwart following The Awakening and The Gift – elevates the horror. She is not only unafraid to play the spikier, brittle elements of Beth’s character (there is a terrific scene early on where she drops her façade and delivers full-on honesty to a mother complaining about her son’s grade), but also fully commits to the more outlandish scenes in the script: a potentially cringeworthy moment where she is embraced by a spirit is surprisingly effective. Beth is a rare horror hero who leans into the supernatural rather than runs away from it and Hall plays that arc for all it is worth.