‘The Night House’ Review — Grief, ghosts, and gut-churning dread [Fantasia Film Festival]

A review of the new horror film, at Fantasia Festival now and in theaters August 20th

On the first night after his funeral, she hears two knocks in the night, and then three. The next morning the gate to the dock is wide open, even though she’s sure she closed it the night before. A boat bobs gently on the lake. What looks like muddy footprints seem to lead up to the house, but that can’t be possible, because her husband is dead.

In The Night House, director David Bruckner’s chilling new horror film, Rebecca Hall plays Beth, a woman reeling from her architect husband Owen’s unexpected suicide. (He is played in flashbacks and photos by Evan Jonigkeit.) When we meet Beth, her grief is still fresh and raw, and she staggers around her empty home as though unable to catch a full breath, on the verge of hyperventilation and total bodily exhaustion. When she sees her friends she is biting and sarcastic, at once a live wire of pain and anguish while also trying desperately not to let her grief completely overwhelm her. Rebecca Hall is tremendous.

“I died back in Tennessee, did I tell you that story?” she asks her best friend Claire (Sarah Goldberg), attempting to launch into a halting…