By [ad_1]
The Night House’s ending is a surprisingly twisty finale that raises the stakes for the metaphysical questions at the heart of the film.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Night House, now playing in theaters.
The Night House is a dark and haunting horror film. It primarily centers on Beth (Rebecca Hall), a woman dealing with the loss of her husband. But there’s a deeper secret at play, which Beth realizes as the film progresses.
The ending of The Night House explains what supernatural element has been following her while leaving things ambiguous enough for the audience to add their own interpretation. At the same time, it still manages to conclusively end Beth’s story.
The Night House is almost entirely focused on Beth, and how her idyllic life with her husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) was upended by his sudden and surprising suicide. Beth looks for answers among her husband’s effects while cleaning out their home, and finds hints that Owen might have been involved in some hidden murders. But her discoveries and her perspective, increasingly thrown asunder by her grief, only create more questions. She also seems to be followed by some presence in her house that even the skeptical Beth suspects may be her husband’s spirit.
Beth discovers evidence on Owen’s phone that he seemingly was seeing — and in some cases stalking — women who shared a physical similarity to her. Confronting one, she discovers Owen and her had almost had an affair, but that Owen revealed a violent side. When the woman confronted him about it, he begged for forgiveness. Investigating further, Beth finds evidence that Owen may have even killed some of the women he brought to an under-construction hidden house in the woods. Beth also begins to see visions of Owen and women within the building and then within her own home, with Owen murdering the women with his bare hands. Back in her own home, Beth is seemingly faced with the spirit and even reaches out to feel him — before being shunted around the house violently when it confirms it isn’t Owen.
Finally arriving in their living room, seemingly years earlier when Owen sat with an asleep Beth on their couch, the spirit reveals to Beth that it is Death itself. An earlier encounter with Beth in her youth — which Beth had referenced earlier in the film during a conversation with her friend Claire (Sarah Goldberg) — had left Death waiting for her. It tried to force Owen to kill Beth, but instead, he chose to kill other women to confuse and distract Death. Finally, Owen realized he could no longer carry on his role as her brutal protector and instead turned a gun on himself. Death is able to effectively force Beth out into the lake with her clothes and the same weapon. But she remains restrained long enough for Claire and Beth’s neighbor Mel (Vondie Curtis-Hall) to reach her in time and help her.
The Night House is largely atmospheric, with the scares defined by the sense of dread and mystery over whatever Beth keeps seeing out of the corner of her eye. This makes the eventual twists and turns of the ending so shocking, as the world itself seems to bend to ruin Beth’s spirit and sense of reality. It’s a surprisingly straightforward answer, but one that has deceptively deep implications. While Death wants to claim Beth, it’s not shown to be malicious or cruel, just a force of nature that can’t really stop. But it’s also possible that all her discoveries are truly only in her head, as she has wrestled with during most of the film. The only certainty that Beth (and the audience) can truly take from the finale is the idea that Beth has overcome the reach of death — for now.
To see Beth overcome Death, watch The Night House in theaters now.
About The Author
[ad_2]
