The Beach House
“The Beach House” has many elements we’ve seen before in horror films- fans of “The Fog,” “The Mist” and this year’s “Color Out of Space” will see some commonalities- but the reason writer/director Jeffrey A. Brown’s thriller is so effective is because he presents these ideas in a different setting, in a different manner, and has the technical prowess to make it compelling from a movie standpoint. There’s also a lead performance by Liana Liberato, who projects an intelligence to go along with the determination her character has to show in trying to navigate this new world. Not a lot of horror movies have that.
The film begins with Emily (Liberato) and Randall (Noah Le Gros) going to his family’s beach house for a weekend getaway. To their surprise, they find that they are not alone; family friends (Jake Weber’s Mitch and Maryanne Nagel’s Jane) are also staying there. So, they decide to make the most of it. When Randall brings out some edible pot, all four imbibe, kicking off an evening that will lead to a morning where their whole worlds change.
If you’re familiar with the films I name-checked above, you can probably figure out something of what’s going to happen during this film, although I’ve left off other elements in terms of how the movie progresses from there. It becomes a survival story at the start of a larger situation that might be a bit surreal for people to watch during a pandemic, but it only stands to make us feel more uneasy about what we’re seeing. Brown does an effective job of building suspense, and maintaining it, with minimal use of effects or outright horror elements until he’s ready to introduce them. When he does, they are fittingly unsettling as body horror and biological horror effects; he’s built a “monster,” such as it is, that feels right at home with reality, and it’s why the film holds our interest. The way Brown shoots the beach uses the natural beauty of the setting to disarm us so that, when the story starts to bring its scares to us we feel something sinister in the landscape around us, and it becomes a claustrophobic experience.
Leading us through the narrative is Emily. She’s finishing up her Masters, and looking at going for her Doctorates in Astrobiology, an interest that comes in handy during this particular situation. In what feels like a rarity for many horror movies, this character is written and performed in a way where that intelligence comes through. She isn’t just a standard-issue “final girl” in a horror movie, and it’s one of the things that I liked most about the film, and one of the reasons this trip to the beach house, while not a fun one, is compelling to watch.
