On darkness, Nietszche offered, “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.” The Night House, an expertly-crafted, terrifying ghost story with a towering lead performance from Rebecca Hall, takes this sentiment to heart. Hall is Beth, a widow hoping to understand her husband Owen’s (Evan Jonigkeit) shocking suicide, diving into the dark recesses of his cell phone and discovering more than she bargained for. Glimpsing the abyss beyond, Beth confronts a terrifying, mutually exclusive truth: either ghosts exist or there truly is nothing waiting for us beyond this mortal coil.

The ongoing mystery of Owen’s death, and life before it, is layered on top of traditional things-that-go-bump-in-the-night scares as Beth finds herself enprisoned in their picturesque lakeside dream house where a full-blown haunting appears to be taking root. Having been declared legally dead when she was pancaked in a car accident years before, Beth remains convinced that there is nothing waiting in the afterlife save darkness. The film written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, the duo behind the sinister horror gem Super Dark Times, drives this point home, “There’s no light at the end of the tunnel. There’s just more tunnel.”

Digging into her deceased husband’s catalogue of secrets, Beth becomes a posthumous detective, piecing together a sinister underside of her husband she never suspected whilst he walked the Earth. The more she learns, the closer her own flirtation with death. Disturbing imagery, particularly of the bound and impaled Louvre doll, ties back into the arcane idea of fending over evil spirits through binding spells. In a sense, marriages is in itself a kind of binding spell that couples cast upon themselves. For Beth, she is now bound to a corpse. And to be bound to death is an inescapable fate.

In what very well may be the scariest horror movie since Hereditary, The Night House deals with human-level horrors – the impossibility of loss, discovering your spouse’s deepest, darkest secrets, losing the will to live – as well as some ethereal unknowable mythic horrors – where a kaleidoscopic and labyrinth mirror world awaits to snatch souls and drive them to human sacrifice. Laced with an undercurrent of unbearable grief, The Night House allows Hall that kind of towering next-level performance that can be annually glimpsed in arthouse horror. In line with the Toni Collette/Lupita Nyong’o knockout horror movie turns that critics groups may appreciate but “proper” awards wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, Hall is outstanding here, as good as she’s ever been.

Director David Bruckner (The Ritual) is able to perfectly fold the grounding human drama and Hall’s exposed-like-a-raw-nerve performance into insanely effective frights, the jump scares amongst the best in the business; disorienting flashbangs that’ll throttle you from your seat. Using the parameters of Beth’s increasing detachment from reality, the film mimics her mental deterioration by smash-cutting between time and space, often to punch-you-in-the-face terrifying effect. There’s a stretch in the middle of the film where Bruckner ratchets up the fear so much that my heart raced with the ferocity of a Ferrari engine. There is not such thing as “too scary” but The Night House almost had me begging to return to the relative comfort of morning daylight.

Bruckner’s use of negative space as a booby trap for scares is tremendous, scaling up and down alongside thrashing sound design to elicit paralyzing unease in his audience. You could hear a pin drop at certain moments, the crowd collectively holding their breathe in anticipation. Other moments, the screams come in unison. For only his second feature film, Bruckner has proved he knows the language of true terror in weaponizes it here.

Though this stylistically feels like an import from the 1970s, cranked up with Ari Aster levels of explosive modern jump scares, The Night House takes its cues from a wide swath of horror films with DNA in common with Ghost, What Lies Beneath, The Witch, Honeymoon and even Final Destination. Bruckner intended to create a movie that’s open to interpretation, that allows audience to make their own meaning out of mist and myth, and in doing so has created a cerebral puzzle box of a film that allows the mind to go to dark and dangerous places. Spiraling human despair pairs nicely with explosive scares and The Night House proves that you don’t always have to fully understand to appreciate; and that’s often what makes the world so terrifying to live in.

CONCLUSION: Rebecca Hall gives a commanding turn as a widow in the midst of a haunting in this kaleidoscopic maelstrom of scares. Director David Bruckner uses all the tools at his disposal to crank the terror up to extreme levels in ‘The Night House’ while still delivering a movie that’s grounded in earnest human emotion.