Rebecca Hall on The Night House , the Most Expertly Made Horror Movie of the Year

Before you see David Bruckner’s disconcerting and expertly made new horror film The Night House, in which the Rebecca Hall delivers a tour de force performance as a grieving widow in a haunted house, you should watch Bruckner’s previous horror movie 2018’s The Ritual. Or try to watch it. My wife left the room after the first 30 nerve-rattling minutes of The Ritual, which tells the story of four grieving British friends who go hiking in remote Sweden and encounter something ancient and horrifying in the woods.

It was the first question I asked Hall when I spoke to her a couple of weeks ago about The Night House: Did you manage to get through The Ritual? “I did indeed,” she said, as part of her research into Bruckner's work. “I ... I had to,” she added. “And I was horror stricken.”

Let me say up front that I liked The Night House even more than The Ritual. The Night House has more nuanced things to say about grief and secrets, but I was glad I’d prepared myself for what Bruckner is capable of, as one of the most interesting young American horror filmmakers working today, which is to fray your nerves and deliver shocks to the system—not with gore but with technique, sound, lighting, editing, production design. As Hall told me, “This is a director really in control of the craft of his genre. He is someone quite serious to be reckoned with.”

The Night House is set on a lake home in the woods of upstate New York, where Hall’s character Beth, a local high school teacher, has recently suffered the suicide of her architect husband, Owen. The house she’s left with was his passion project and it’s stylishly made, simple and open—not the kind of place we associate with ghosts. But this one creaks at night, and the stereo plays Beth and Owen’s wedding song without warning and those are definitely ghostly footprints leading from the dock to the house (Owen shot himself in the rowboat). As she becomes convinced that Owen is haunting her, Beth starts to uncover his secrets: a mistress who looks just like her (Stacy Martin), a stash of occult books, another mirror-image house he was building across the lake. She also obsesses about the meaning of his ambiguous suicide note (“You were right. There is nothing, nothing after you”) and a near-death experience she had years before.

Reality and the supernatural mix and Hall is intense and committed and carries you through a movie that will scare you senseless and also disorient as it layers on the secrets and proceeds to its strange, ambiguous conclusion. It is one of Hall's very best performances in a varied and impressive career. I spoke to her about the extremities of playing Beth.

Vogue: How do you sort through the emotions of a troubled character like Beth in The Night House. Her husband has just killed himself without warning. There’s grief, restlessness, drinking too much, fear….

Rebecca Hall: To me, there was something fundamentally interesting about the idea of a woman dealing with the aftermath of a suicide of a loved one and being left with this sense of—I didn’t know that person. And if they were capable of that, what else were they capable of? In a weird way, Beth imagining the worst version of her husband, the most monstrous version of him, is almost easier to process than the reality of what happened. I thought that was compelling and fascinating and true in a way on an instinctive level. What someone can go through in the aftermath of a suicide is just...huge.

That’s right. The Night House is as much about Beth as it is about this supernatural mystery. It’s about coping.

I think there’s an entire read of the movie that is just about Beth’s psychological breakdown and coming out on the other side and processing that.

I wondered if there was an element of improvisation to what you did in the movie. Especially in some of the more physically intense, supernatural scenes.

Yeah, there was a lot. There’s one that sticks out in my memory. I think I rather naively assumed that there would be a choreographer and people coordinating the scenes with the invisible...presence...whatever you want to call it, I don’t want to spoil anything. And then when it came to the day it was very much like okay so now’s the scene where you make out with the ghost…and, uh, what are you going to do, Rebecca? Well, I’m going to make a fool of myself in front of all these people is what I’m going to do! And I’m going to try to be brave and not care about it! [Laughs] I’m making a sort of crass joke about it but there was something really liberating about that because David [Bruckner] did trust me to just...physically embody what was happening. So it turned into this weird modern dance situation which I actually tremendously enjoyed. I was just sort of hurling myself around the room and playing with all the possibilities that could be happening and that was fun.

I’ve seen you in a lot of dark, tortured roles like this one—thinking especially of Christine from 2016. Are you longing for a slapstick comedy or something, especially after a film like The Night House?

I’d love to do a comedy—even a dramedy would be nice! [Laughs] I don’t know why this keeps happening. I’m not sort of some sort of very, very dark person. So it is quite bizarre. I suppose I do have a strange compulsion to make things as hard for myself as they can be, otherwise I think I sort of lose interest on some level. Which is not to suggest that a comedy wouldn’t be hard but the things that have come up like The Night House that have that element tend to be on the darker spectrum of things so I suppose that’s why I end up doing it again and again.

Originally Appeared on Vogue