Any good?


This movie came out last year and has a 6.1 rating, but oddly only 3 reviews in IMDb and no discussions here at all? Anyone seen this?

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for me it's on par with "the babadook" and maybe even "hereditary". it works best if you know nothing about the plot in advance.

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It's irrelevant whether you check the plot in advance or not. It's a Hollywood horror movie in 2021: you already know that the plot is about one or several evil white males trying to harm a poor innocent female.

The only unknown is whether that/those evil white male/males are killers, a cult, a supernatural monster, a ghost, an evil ex-husband, some other horror trope or a combination of the previous ones. Which is the case here?

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lol, none of it is true, firstly it's not a hollywood movie, but an indie production, and the plot isn't about "evil white males trying to harm a poor innocent female". it's more of a drama / psychological thriller, and that's exactly why i suggested you should watch it without knowledge, to see the plot unravel and slowly find out what it actually is about is part of the fun with flicks like this.

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I wasn't planning to watch it, I barely watch Hollywood movies anymore (recent ones) so I checked the plot, out of curiosity.

Well, I was right after all. It was about the poor female and the ghost of his evil white male ex-husband. It seems that I avoided wasting a couple of hours 😁

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not sure where you got that from, but that's not the plot of the movie. there's no ghost of an evil ex-husband, her husband wasn't evil at all - on the contrary, they loved each other and as it turns out, the husband tried to "save" his wife from an entity called "nothing" ("nothing" has a double meaning in the movie, it's bascially death or say "the reaper" that's after the woman ever since she had a near death experience in the past, but you can also see it as an allegory for depression)

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It's in the wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_House

I read it more slowly and you're right up to a point. The ex-husband didn't try to kill his wife, but killed lots of other women instead (you know, that kind of stuff white males do in their spare time 😁)

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what are some horror movies that you enjoyed?

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Mostly Asian. If I had to choose, Ringu, Dark Water, The Wailing (if you haven't seen this one, watch it), A Tale of Two Sisters or the Ju-On franchise.

Western? Well, first and foremost, anything from John Carpenter. Beyond that, mmm, Let the Right One In (the swedish original one). Recent ones, I liked The Autopsy of Jane Doe and The Witch. And I have a thing for found footage, but that's more of a guilty pleasure.

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i've seen all of them and i don't see why you shouldn't have enjoyed "the night house" as well. as said, it's not a hollywood movie.

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Mmmm... well, I'll give it a try. To be honest, I'm quite cautious about modern western movies, but you can always find hidden little jewels.

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I'm a horror nut. Man, you've got some good stuff listed there. Nice to see a shout-out for The Autopsy of Jane Doe 👍

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Glad to see another connoisseur 😁

BTW, recs are welcome 🙂

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And likewise! Have you seen The Vigil? It put me in mind of TAOJD.

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The Vigil queued 😁

Hard to recommend unknown stuff. The peaks of Asian Horror are well-known. However, there's interesting things here and there.

Hansel and Gretel (2007). It's not a great movie, but it's well done and has a very attractive concept: mixing fairy tales and horror. And I'm not talking about emo gothic fairy tales, but about very twisted horror.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1002567/

Re-Cycle (2006). A woman trying to escape a deadly world. The movie is just OK, but the concept is rarely seen in live-action movies, and the visuals are amazing.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTk0MjA2Mjg0MV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNzc5NTg5MTE@._V1_.jpg

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498311/

Spider Forest (2004). Haven't seen it in a while, but I loved it. What I liked the most is that it works great as a ghost story, but it works even better as a thriller. It's one of those movies that it's like a puzzle where you have to join the pieces.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407821/

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Thanks for those!

Here are a few others I caught up with recently,

Into the Mirror (2003 ~ South Korea) The movie that Kiefer Sutherland's movie Mirrors was based on.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0372937/

The Abandoned (2015 ~ US) Girl takes job as night security in large, abandoned luxury apartment building.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3311988/

Net I Die (2017 ~ Thailand) Social media influencer commits suicide online, then returns a year later to take revenge on 'shamers'.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7154176/

Incarnate (2016 ~ US) Aaron Eckhart as a unique kind of exorcist (kinda like The Exorcist meets Inception).
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3216348/

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btw, right before i watched "fear street" on netflix - that's what i call your run-of-the-mill hollywood horror - cheesy and almost unbearable to watch. so i was glad that "the night house" turned out to be something else entirely.

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If you wanna check good horror, I'd recommend 3 animes you probably haven't seen.

Shadows House. I just finished this one last week. Damn, it's gonna be long until season 2.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13362302/

The Promised Neverland
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8788458/

When They Cry
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0845738/

Don't get me wrong. Horror rarely works in animated shows. But they work as (very) creepy fairytales. And avoid spoilers as hell. The less you know, the better.

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thanks, never watched any animes (never got into animated stuff in general), but if i do i might check these out.

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I use to recommend modern anime a lot 😊, but it's worth it. Of course, you still have shows with endless boring battles with superpowers for teens, but there's other genres and much more than that.

For example, Haibaine Renmei, which is probably my favorite show and which I consider nothing less than a masterpiece. It's not horror, but it has that 'strange fairytale' quality. This wonderful review says it better than I ever could do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFM_gLwN_Yk

In general, horror doesn't work well in Anime. Animated is just not scary. But fairytales work well, including dark and creepy fairytales. When They Cry and The Promised Neverland have that dark and creepy quality. Shadows House is less creepy, but still intriguing.

One funny example. School-Live AKA Gakko Gurashi looks like a 'cute girls' anime, but it has probably the most shocking and creepiest plot twist I've seen since Sixth Sense, that twist that Shyamalan has been looking for years without success. If you watch it, don't watch trailers, or reviews, or even images in google. The plot twist happens after 2-3 short episodes, and (sadly) I can't really recommend the rest of the show, which it's just meh. But the twist sticks with you like a bitter knot in the pit of your stomach.

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I'd agree with The Babadook, cause I didn't care for that movie much and neither do I think much of this one. But Hereditary is a whole other league for me - I think it's one of the best horrors in the last decade and it had some genuinely scary & freaky scenes. This movie and the Babadook were pretty tame in comparison.

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Yes, it is good, an intelligent, atmospheric mystery with a really strong lead performance from Rebecca Hall. I rated it an 8/10.

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I too liked her work and think she carried this movie with its weak script & absurd plot as much as anyone possibly could. And I liked the first 30-40 mins of this flick, but not enough to overlook the way it ended, which was pretty lame IMO.

I thought I was being generous with my 6, but you're far more forgiving lol.

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It wasn't good. It's one of those bad movies that got a good rating on RT. Really do not understand critics and their sense of good movies lately. I will say this: The buildup was good. The tension and scares in the movie were great. But the last 30 minutes really ruins it. The ending ruins it. The movie had all this buildup attached to it. The movie was setting up for an explosive ending. And then the ending basically undid all of the scares before. It was bad. And it makes me upset what is passing for good in Hollywood these days. You look back to classics like Nightmare on Elm Street, The Shining, and all these movies that were made with limited technology and budgets and you see how much better they were. Today's films have so much more resources. There are so many good writers that the field is so flooded. You can pay for the greatest screenplays ever. But they don't pick great screenplays it seems. It seems they pick screenplays that are simple? I guess maybe they're more profitable. But I also don't understand this reliance on reboots and remakes when we have an abundance of writers. This movie is, unfortunately a huge letdown. And the biggest letdown isn't how bad the movie is, but the fact that this movie passes as good these days....

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Agree 100%. It's almost unbelievable how many lame scripts get made into movies today, often with a budget of 10s of millions of dollars if not more.

With all the writing talent out there, how hard can it be to make the plot maintain the pace and tension that the first part of the movie builds and take it to a satisfying conclusion? Though I liked parts of it, I don't think I'll re-watch it again.

There are still some decent horror/thriller movies that come out of the Hollyweird assembly line nowadays (Run, Malignant, Life, Hereditary and Brighburn to give 5 examples from the last 5 years) but they seem few and far between.

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So I saved this movie for Halloween and finally saw it without reading any reviews or spoilers. Even though I liked parts of it, I would rate it a 6 at best, with most of that score due to Rebecca Hall's acting and the initial build up (which almost made me think this was another invisible man movie).

I had a lot of problems with the final act and found the plot to be just plain absurd. So "Death" tells RH's husband that it wants her back and he turns into a serial killer??? And the movie expects us to sympathize with him and make it look like she's almost relieved that he was doing it all to protect her. I think her anger & confusion at his offing himself would've turned into rage and hatred at knowing he killed all those women, even if he did it under the excuse of trying to save her.

If something whispered into my head/ear that it wants my wife to die, I think I would seek professional help, rather than simply believe the voice and start killing a whole bunch of innocent women like a full blown psychopath. If the thing had the power to manifest its malevolence, then there's no point trying to trick it - it would just claim her life one way or another a la Final Destination. If it needed him to deliver her and can be deceived with the ridiculous maze, then it's not worth being scared of to the extent of going on a killing spree just to buy a little time after each murder.

Not to mention the guy would've had to have been a full-time Lothario and creep to scope out women who looked like her, seduce them and then kill them (and that too using such crude methods like smashing their head against a mirror lol), all while she was simply doing a 9-5 job.

It was OK as a one-time watch. Don't think I'll be seeing this movie again. Happy Halloween to everyone in MC.

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Not particularly, no. The build up is good at times, but the ending sucks

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My take as well. I gave it a 5/10

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Definitely good, especially since good horror movies are few and far between. My family and I paused it many times for discussion. I love movies like that.

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