Editorials
Suicide, Depression, and Loss in ‘The Night House’
Content Warning: this editorial contains explicit details about suicide.
This article also includes spoilers for The Night House.
I walked out of the theater last weekend after seeing The Night House absolutely gutted. Very few horror films have ever managed to pulverize me in such a totally debilitating way that I literally couldn’t catch my breath. It’s an experience that rivals, perhaps usurps, my visceral, deeply-personal reaction to Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man. This spooky ghost story captures the merciless betrayal of one’s own thoughts, the depressive sort which insidiously worms into your brain 一 and before you know it, you’re thinking about killing yourself every single day.
Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski’s joint screenplay sets the framework, and David Bruckner’s direction creeps into your eye sockets, strokes of playful surrealism and frank realism shape-shifting and bending together and then apart into a magnificently unsettling and brutal landscape. The human condition is nothing if not frail and dissolvable under the most strenuous and traumatic of conditions. Mental health lies at the center of this story, an imposing force that makes its presence known even when a particular scene has nothing to do with it. It’s malevolent. And unstoppable. And terrifying.
Bruckner plucks upon genre conventions like a harpist on their gilded, shiny new instrument 一 toying with the haunted house set-up, the unreliable narrator, and a little demonic possession 一 weaving to and fro between expectation and impossibility. He makes you comfortable with tradition one moment, totally detonating it the very next. There’s an immersive quality to the filmmaking, intrinsically-linked to the emotional weight by which Rebecca Hall delivers her star-turn performance.
I anticipated a good ole fashion scare. And I certainly got it in spades. But anvils of misery and guilt and grief and suffocating sadness hurled at my head and chest 一 no, I did not even imagine the film would pierce me like it did. The marketing conveniently (and thankfully) side-steps these emotional roots, which when watered so attentively by Bruckner, took hold of my soul, morphing it into some knotted, strangling, and throbbing mass of dirt and rot.
The film is Beth’s (Hall) story, opening in the hours following her late husband Owen’s (Evan Jonigkeit) funeral. She’s noticeably emotionless. A loved one consoles her, saying final farewells and meaningless platitudes on the front steps. No amount of thin solace could possibly make her pain any less real and any less raw. In the moment, it’s an annoyance, no matter how well-intentioned. The ensuing days trip one right into the next; Owen’s suicide follows her around as a dark, swirling cloud shrouding every waking moment of her life, from mundane household tasks to her work as a speech teacher at the local high school. When a disgruntled parent makes an unexpected appointment to discuss her son’s C+ final grade, and displays little empathy for Beth’s “personal matter,” Beth rips into her as a python snagging on flesh and reveals exactly how her husband died: “My husband shot himself in the head last Thursday.”
So, you’ll have to forgive her if she is unbothered by some student named Hunter and his lack of preparation for the final presentation. It’s the least of her worries. Her mind is haunted, by both Owen’s abrupt departure and her own depression-addled thoughts. As she reveals to a group of friends over a couple drinks, she’s long suffered with depression, while Owen never did, or at least never expressed suicidal thoughts, so his death comes as a cataclysmic shock 一 just as confusing as anything else.
Stages of grief, as we’ve come to understand, don’t fall like dominoes. Rather, the stages pour out as summer rain, frequently torrential and always unexpected. Beth swings from one extreme to another 一 cold and distant to boiling with anger (and every emotional beat in between). She eventually settles upon a quest for answers, flipping through boxes of Owen’s personal belongings, sketches of their home’s floor plan (which he mostly built himself), and his phone, seeking for some breadcrumb or clue to help her understand why he took his own life.
Even his suicide note doesn’t quite put all the puzzle pieces into place. “You were right. There is nothing,” he penned on a single cutout of paper. “Nothing is after you. You’re safe now.” Those words are soul-rattling. Four simple lines. Nothing about love or adoration or an apology, as often are present in suicide notes. No concrete declarations that would make sense to the outsider.
But the “nothing” stings Beth to her core. That nothing actually, in fact, means everything. She once died, she confides in her best friend Claire (Sarah Goldberg), when she was 17. She’d endured a grisly car crash, and her vital organs were essentially crushed. She was proclaimed dead… for four minutes. And what she felt in that brief time span felt like an eternity. Many have suggested that the afterlife is like a long tunnel and a light penetrates the overwhelming blackness 一 or so they say. But not for Beth. The afterlife is nothing but a tunnel. Nothing.
Like Beth, that nothing hangs over my life. It’s like a veil. I’ve passed through it many times in my life. You don’t know exactly how to describe it to other people 一 even now, I’m having a hard time defining it in terms people can understand, but I’ll try…
I believe I traveled through that nothing. 12 years ago, I tried to kill myself. It wasn’t anything new. I’d tried to kill myself many times before. But this time was somehow different. This time I felt close to death. Or so my memory of it tells me. I remember every detail about that night. The coolness of February ripe on my skin. The way my mind spiraled like a hypnotist’s wheel after I gobbled an entire jumbo bottle of Tylenol. The black slime that erupted from my intestines, as I staggered through the desolate streets of my neighborhood. The moon hung low, I remember that too, sharp lines of silver dancing across my quivering eyelids. The way I tumbled onto the concrete, tiny gravel biting into my palms. Every single detail.
I was floating outside of myself. I could neither grasp the past nor the present 一 yet the future, a future without me, seemed to clobber me over the back of the head. “What the hell am I doing?” I recall thinking most. Then, it was like the floodgates had burst, and I fell down, down, down into whole black nothing: What will people think? What damage have I done? How could I do this to my friends and family? Will they even be able to move on? What happens now? Where does my soul go? What about my belongings? Will they go to charity? What if I could save myself?
All those questions left me empty handed. I had nothing. We have nothing when it comes right down to it. That’s the tragedy of it all. Suicide is a cannonball, splashing into the surface of life, and it’s the outward ripples that effect everything and everyone you’ve ever come into contact with. Beth is so desperate to understand, Owen’s suicide begins affecting her ability to remain in the present. As Claire aptly points out, she’s still alive and in the here and now. But Beth has already lost parts of herself, whirling down a rabbit hole to some warped Wonderland in which she comes to learn Owen might have harbored a darker secret than she ever could have predicted.
Almost immediately, Beth experiences auditory hallucinations 一 creaky floor boards, the stereo turning on full-blast by itself, and vicious knocking on the front door. It’s hard to surmise if she’s just consumed by her grief, anger, and loneliness, or if those sounds are actually occurring in the space. You know, grief can do terrible things to a person and their ability to hold onto reality. The story, however, soon descends into madness 一 with parts of the house’s architecture turning into human faces and Owen’s voice puncturing through from the other side. The film seems to take cues from such nerve-tingling films as The Entity and The Invisible Man, as Owen, or his spiritual likeness, wraps himself around her body (there are some visual effects here that are absolutely chilling) before turning unnaturally sinister.
Beth is also cursed with unsettling dreams. One night, she catches a glimpse of young women darting through the trees and foliage, leaping to their death over a cliff at the edge of the property line. In another, she traipses through the woods and discovers a house not unlike her own, only in reverse. Peering through the windows, she witnesses her own likeness, but everything is just a little askew. These visions, perhaps a manifestation of her own real-life paranoia and hopelessness, seem to suggest that photos of other women on Owen’s phone are the keys to unlock the greater mystery.
This investigation is the least interesting part of the film, though. The Night House is a carnival ride of pain, a heart-rending menagerie of depression and delusion. Owen might have been the one to kill himself, but Beth is now plagued with her own demons, which resurface in bright hot-pan flashes like landmines being tripped by thought alone. She blames herself for not doing enough and not knowing what had gone awry, turning the metaphorical blade inward upon her own body.
As the story progresses, a demonic entity reveals itself to have taken possession of Owen, certainly representative of his own struggles, leading into the fingernail-splitting finale. The last scene finds Beth taking the boat, the same boat in which Owen murdered himself, out onto the lake. There, she witnesses Owen’s final moments 一 quickly bleeding into her own life and death confrontation. Now, that same threatening being taunts Beth into killing herself. The soundtrack has all but faded, leaving only the slap of water against the metallic siding of the boat. The viewer is left to soak in this razor-sharp imagery: a blood-red backdrop floods the screen, transfixing Beth at the center of what could be her very last moment on earth.
She holds the pistol in her lap, the same pistol which killed Owen, turning it slightly, tenderly in her fingertips. She flips the barrel toward her head. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. It’s almost as if there’s a silent time-bomb nearing zero; I’ve never felt so tense in my movie-going experience, as I held back both tears and my breath, waiting for her decision. The gun yawns its mouth agape, nearly directly into the camera. Beth remains slumped over and drained of every ounce of energy she had left. There’s nothing left for her. Nothing.
With this stunningly beautiful and tragic finale, tears waiting to burst from my eyes, I saw myself. I saw myself up there on that screen. Being on the verge of death, and being the one in control of it, is something that haunts me sometimes. It haunts me every waking hour and every deep midnight slumber. When I’m quietly tucked into bed with my three cats, my thoughts are pained and tortured. It’s been 12 years since I last tried to kill myself, but that doesn’t mean my brain isn’t still clouded with depression. It’s a daily battle. Sometimes, I win. Sometimes, I lose 一 quite gloriously.
But I am alive and able to witness such masterpieces as The Night House that dig glistening talons into life’s messiest and most devastating layers. That’s the magnificence of art. It can be truly cathartic to see misery smeared like blotches of reds, blues, and yellows on otherwise porcelain canvas. To see one’s guts splayed out and mixed and treated with delicacy. It’s hard to imagine this film working for everyone (it most certainly will turn some viewers off), but there’s value in that alone. The film gives me another reason to keep on breathing 一 to bask in the beauty of filmmaking, to learn, to laugh, to dream. And to seize each new dawn as a true blessing… as Beth eventually, and triumphantly, did.
Editor’s Note: If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, you are not alone. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is open 24/7 at 1-800-273-8255.
Rebecca Hall appears in The Night House by David Bruckner.
Editorials
How Marina de Van Uses Body Horror and Pain to Explore Trauma in ‘In My Skin’ and ‘Dark Touch’
Pain is the language of New French Extremity.
Known for excruciating violence and gore, what often distinguishes these visceral films is the depiction of emotional turmoil manifested as the destruction of human flesh. Few filmmakers make this comparison so literally as Marina de Van.
The French writer/director burst onto the scene in 2002 with her shocking In My Skin, a tale of self-discovery via grisly self-harm. Eleven years later, she would write and direct Dark Touch, the harrowing story of a traumatized girl who expresses her pain through telekinetic force.
Though they differ wildly in tone and subject, both In My Skin and Dark Touch deal with the horror of unexpressed agony and its tendency to break the skin, ripping and shredding through anything in its path.
In My Skin (2002): Self-Harm as a Response to Emotional Repression
This intensely personal film stars de Van as Esther, a corporate analyst on the verge of having it all. Her adoring boyfriend Vincent (Laurent Lucas) is poised to move in, and she’s been targeted for promotion thanks to her diligent work. During a high-pressure networking party, Esther wanders outside and trips over an open construction site, ripping her pants on an abandoned tool. It’s only later that she notices blood on the floor and realizes that she’s torn the skin of her calf as well. Surprisingly, Esther has not felt a thing.
The surgeon who stitches up the wound marvels at this lack of sensitivity, wondering if the problem is not her shredded flesh — she’s still able to feel the lightest touch — but a misalignment in her head. This wound unlocks a disturbing pattern of dissociative self-mutilation as Esther begins cutting and gouging her skin to cope with moments of emotional stress.
Her first intentional act of self-harm follows a minor mistake in a document. After noticing that she’s misused a word, Esther fixes the error, then sneaks away to slice her thigh with a stray piece of metal. Though she has caught the mistake herself, Esther anticipates punishment for imperfection. The subsequent wound on her thigh is proof that she has paid for her transgression and can now return to solid ground, having completed the cycle of shameful correction.
As we peel back the layers of Esther’s life, we’re aghast at the toxicity of her environment. The inciting fall happens shortly after she politely declines a dinner invitation from her older colleague, an inappropriate sexual advance dressed up as an offer for mentorship. At another party, her male coworkers drag her towards the pool, threatening to pull off her pants when she screams that she’s not wearing a bathing suit.
Esther flees this disturbing scene, but not because of the men’s aggressiveness. She’s disturbed to find that her struggle to break free has reopened the still-healing wound on her leg, causing unsightly blood to seep through her pants. Like many women in the corporate world, she’s been conditioned to view her presence as an optional privilege and to create comfort for her male colleagues. Should she negatively react to their atrocious behavior, they may deem her “too emotional” and take away her hard-earned position.
But this toxic environment only exacerbates Esther’s need to self-harm. At a working dinner, a wealthy client pressures her to drink expensive wine, then continues to refill her glass. Increasingly unmoored, Esther finds her hand creeping onto her dinner plate. After repeatedly dragging it out of her food, she notices the appendage lying limp on the table, completely disconnected from her upper arm. This surrealist moment in an otherwise grounded film is a turning point in her violent journey. Esther sees how desensitized her body has become and the lengths she will go to perform unobtrusive compliance.
Desperate to regain control, Esther gouges her forearm with a steak knife stolen from the table, hiding the carnage under a napkin. Humiliated, she concludes the evening in a nearby hotel, where she indulges this dangerous new compulsion. For hours, Esther lovingly slices her arms and legs, gnawing on loose flesh and suckling blood from extensive wounds. She seems enamored with her ability to feel again without being perceived by anyone else.
Disturbed by her scars, Vincent offers shaky support while contributing to Esther’s unexpressed pain. During an intense discussion about buying their first home, Esther forgets her PIN at an ATM and bursts into tears on the street. Vincent offers an easy solution, only showing his frustration behind closed doors. He lashes out at his stunned girlfriend, conflating her emotional stress with his own inadequacy.
Clearly destabilized by her tears, Vincent baits Esther into soothing him, an echo of the cycle she performs at work. We see that even at home, her emotional needs come second to men who are unequipped to handle their own feelings. Esther has internalized the responsibility of managing Vincent alongside the message that any break in her calm demeanor will lead to more suffering later on.
In the wake of this argument and a rebuke from her boss, Esther suffers a panic attack while walking to work. In a daze, she buys another knife, then takes a hotel room for the day. Blood runs over Esther’s face as she again luxuriates in self-mutilation. De Van finds an uneasy juxtaposition between gruesome carnage and euphoric escape. Alone again with her exquisite pain, Esther seductively runs the knife over her face, digging into the skin around her eye. She chemically preserves a severed piece of flesh then lovingly tucks it inside her bra, a keepsake to honor this violent vacation.
The next day, Esther prepares for work, pulling office attire over her blood-stained skin. De Van does not follow her out the door, leaving us to imagine how she will be received by the men in her life. Will they finally see what they’ve put her through, or will life continue as before, with Esther pretending that nothing is wrong and performing perfection until her body gives out? De Van ends the film with the striking image of Esther lying on the hotel bed, fixing the audience with a knowing stare. Though she carefully hides her fragility, we alone have seen the true cost of survival in this destructive world.
Dark Touch (2013): Trauma, Abuse, and Supernatural Revenge
In many ways, this shocking story of catharsis through violence feels like a thematic response to In My Skin and Esther’s unexpressed pain. Also written and directed by de Van, Dark Touch follows an Irish girl named Niamh (Missy Keating) who becomes the sole survivor of a massacre.
We first meet this little girl screaming from her bedroom window, then running through the stormy night to the house of family friends Nat (Marcella Plunkett) and Lucas Galin (Pádraic Delaney). Niamh’s parents smooth over the incident, presenting the illusion of a happy home. It’s only when the doors are closed that we realize something is dreadfully wrong. De Van implies the worst as the sinister couple creeps into their daughter’s room, commanding her to be a “good girl.” But Niamh is saved from horrific abuse by furniture that seems to move on its own.
De Van leans into her French Extremity roots in what will become a gruesome execution. Niamh’s mother is crushed by a splintering bureau, a loose screw driving itself into her face. Her father watches his wife’s grisly death, then falls on the blades of an ultra-modern light fixture. Flames spread through the house as Niamh cradles her infant brother in a tiny cupboard. When rescuers arrive on the scene, we learn that the baby boy has died, mysteriously smothered by an inhuman force. Now an orphan, Niamh goes to stay with Nat and Lucas, who struggle to meet her emotional needs. Unable to explain her traumatic past, Niamh finds that things move whenever she cries, an outward manifestation of her silenced rage.
Though Nat and Lucas offer support, they only seem to make things worse. Lucas volunteers to stay in Niamh’s room when she has a bad dream, oblivious to the discomfort his presence might cause. Growing impatient when she can’t fall asleep, a snide comment betrays his empty concern. Niamh finally finds solace in photos of the couple’s older daughter, who died from cancer years ago. She clings to an image of the little girl blowing out birthday candles while covered in bruises, drawn to the familiar juxtaposition of a child suffering through visible pain while going about life as if nothing is wrong.
But this too enrages Lucas. When he finds the pictures under her bed, the weeping father shakes Niamh and demands to know what gives her the right to bring up such a devastating memory. While perhaps understandable, Lucas’ reaction tells the traumatized girl that his comfort is the true priority, and she is not allowed to soothe herself.
Niamh’s only friends in the tiny town are young siblings from a similarly violent home. Whistling to them in the night, Niamh uses her emerging telekinesis to kill their abusive mother in an attack similar to the one that destroyed her own family. When Nat arranges for Niamh to attend a birthday party, she bristles at the other girls’ treatment of their baby dolls. They slap and rip at their faux children’s hair, seeming to process their own quasi-abusive upbringing. As she bursts into tears, Niamh spreads fire through the party and melts the faces of the mistreated dolls. That night, she lures the children to school and then destroys the building, violently disrupting what she interprets as a continuous cycle of child abuse.
Next, Niamh turns her attention to her foster parents, telepathically trapping them in her former home. For hours, she puts them through a series of torturous humiliations we assume she endured at her own parents’ hands. Now, Nat and Lucas must suffer in silence as Niamh finally reveals the extent of her misery. Forced to sit with their tormentor at a dinner table, Nat and Lucas quietly weep as flames spread throughout the home. Like Naimh once did, they go through the motions of a happy family, unable to protect themselves. Their foster daughter smiles as the fire consumes them all, finally putting an end to her tragic life.
Despite this murderous conclusion, Niamh is not a traditional villain. She’s a horrifically abused little girl who can’t find a way to express her pain. Though she’s managed to remove herself from immediate danger, every attempt to heal is met with stigma, resentment, or the burden of caring for someone else. When her trauma becomes too uncomfortable, she’s advised to simply stay out of sight.
Like Esther, Niamh exists in a world that expects her to create comfort for everyone else, regardless of the suffering it causes her. But Niamh’s agony can no longer be contained. Abandoning all hope for a happy life, she channels her rage and destroys anyone who crosses her path. Perhaps this is not fair to Nat and Lucas or the children of this tiny town. But what happened to Niamh is also unfair, and her trauma can no longer be ignored.
Though they do not narratively connect, Dark Touch feels like a spiritual successor to In My Skin. Both Esther and Niamh try to swallow their pain, but find it too great to be contained. We leave Esther struggling to stay afloat in a world of male toxicity. Picking up Niamh’s story at a similar moment, we watch the child escape her own abuse only to find that the world doesn’t really care. Her community will only offer support if it doesn’t disrupt their own lives.
Though de Van does not offer us hopeful endings, there’s grim satisfaction in revealing the world as it is, one built on the expectation that women will suffer in silence. Both In My Skin and Dark Touch seem to argue that a society built on women’s pain does not deserve a second chance.
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