The psychological thriller “The Night House” is a haunted house story for a true crime age.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
“In some ways, the film is about realizing that your marriage is not what you thought it was,” says “The Night House” director David Bruckner speaking via Zoom in the COVID-19-era version of a press junket.
Bruckner’s second feature film, “The Night House” was picked up by Searchlight Pictures for a reported $12 million after its January 2020 Sundance Film Festival world premiere.
At its center is a smart, determined schoolteacher Beth (British actress Rebecca Hall) whose architect husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) has checked out of a seemingly happy marriage by committing suicide. Now Beth suspects Owen is contacting her from beyond the grave. Alone in the remote lake house Owen designed, Beth tries to solve the mystery of her dead husband’s secret life.
“The genre person in me was excited about doing a really weird haunted house movie that was also a bit of a gothic romance,” says Bruckner of a film that often evokes psychologically rich, female-centric horror like Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” and the recent Australian dementia-horror film “Relic” along with classic Alfred Hitchcock gothic mysteries like 1940′s “Rebecca.”
Credit: Dunja Dopsaj
Credit: Dunja Dopsaj
A University of Georgia grad, the framework for Bruckner’s own interest in the darker side of life may have been nurtured in his childhood growing up in the Atlanta suburbs: his father was a police detective and his mother worked as an emergency room nurse. Dinner table conversations, he remembers, were interesting.
“There was a lot of caution in my household.
“And so you sort of seek out the things that you’re afraid of, in some ways,” he says of how horror has captured his imagination as a filmmaker.
An active member of the city’s tight, thriving independent film scene in the early 2000s, Bruckner managed to make the leap from the local scene to the national one. But at heart, he says, “I still feel like an Atlanta filmmaker.”
“That’s where my approach to working with actors, and working with story comes from,” he says. He calls those collaborative experiences working in Atlanta “my film school.”
Alongside co-directors Jacob Gentry and Dan Bush, Bruckner launched his film career while still in Atlanta with the release of the 2007 horror film “The Signal,” an anthology film that screened at that year’s Sundance Film Festival and helped propel his move into the film industry.
Since leaving Atlanta, Bruckner has carved out a niche directing smart, psychological television and horror films that put enough spin on genre chestnuts to feel a cut above the usual thriller. His first feature, the creepy “The Ritual,” is a Scandinavian shocker with shades of “Deliverance” and “Midsommar” about a group of buddies who get lost in the Swedish woods where they are targeted by a horrific folklore-worthy Norse monster. With its rich backstory about tensions within a group of friends, Bruckner has called “The Ritual” a film about “masculinity in crisis.”
“I made the film when I was 37-38, and it’s about guys approaching middle age, who are realizing their limitations, and they’re growing out of friendships, and they’re losing respect for one another, in some ways. And that’s a tough, dark place that’s not unfamiliar to me.”
An unusually layered film in its own right, “The Night House” is not just a heart-pounding thriller with a genuinely unnerving litany of shocks that unfold in the entrapping, maze-like set piece of Beth’s lake house. “Some of this is about the awkwardness of grief,” says Bruckner, which also separates and isolates its victims.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
An indication of how Bruckner has gravitated towards projects that elegantly play with genre tropes, “The Night House” also bucks the horror convention of women victims under attack in a smart, genre-defying script by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski.
As Bruckner notes, Beth is not your usual horror scream queen, “she’s not running, jumping, screaming, you know, away from the problem. She’s someone who is going towards the scary things, which is because she’s driven to understand why her husband has taken his life and is willing to put herself in peril to find those answers. So her desire for information, for context to find him in the midst of this is greater than her self preservation.”
Bruckner’s next project is a reimagining of the 1987 Clive Barker horror classic “Hellraiser.” In the same way personal and contemporary anxieties and nuances can imprint his other projects, Bruckner says, “something like ‘Hellraiser’ there’s got to be some core relatable thread,” that he hopes to tap into.
“The Night House” opens Friday, August 20 in Atlanta.
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