The Beach House
I love a good slow-burn horror film. From The Exorcist to The Witch, so many of my favorites take their time getting viewers settled into the movie’s dreadful tone and having them identify with well-developed characters before plunging into unbridled terror. The Beach House — the feature debut from writer/director Jeffrey A. Brown — wants so badly to emulate this type of filmmaking. However, without any interesting characters or ideas of its own, the film winds up being more of a tedious slog than a suspenseful thriller.
The story begins with young couple Emily (Liana Liberato, The Best of Me) and Randall (newcomer Noah Le Gros) who arrive at the titular domicile for a romantic getaway, only to find out they are not alone. Unbeknownst to them, Mitch (Jake Webber, Dawn of the Dead) and Jane (Maryann Nagel, making her film debut) — a couple claiming to be acquaintances of Randall’s father — are currently living on the property. The couples bond after an incredibly uneventful night of drinking, getting high and participating in endless, boring monologues about chemistry. But soon after interacting with a strange outside force, each of the characters begin to notice that they may all be the victims of a deadly infection.
The first half of The Beach House is an absolute chore to sit through — and this is coming from someone who’s pretty forgiving of slower-paced genre fare. The relationship between the two couples proves to have no real effect on the story as it progresses, so why Brown felt so adamant about focusing on them for the majority of the film’s runtime, I’m not sure.
The performances are pretty shabby as well. While Liberato fares much better as an actress in the film’s final act, Le Gros seems to have graduated from the Hayden Christensen school of acting. Vapid and mouth always agape, he’s completely unengaging and the chemistry between him and Liberato is nowhere to be found.
When the horror finally kicks in around the film's 45 minute mark, it welcomely provides a healthy dose of gore and haunting images, and the practical effects work — while nothing groundbreaking — is certainly impressive. One particular sequence involving a self-operation on a foot was gnarly enough to make me want to turn away from the screen.
Sadly, though, even this second act proved to be uninspired when I began to realize that the film — for all of its build-up — would just wind up feeling like a standard, low-budget zombie movie. It doesn’t help matters that Brown’s direction is rather styleless, leaving audiences with a horror flick that has few memorable images.
The Beach House has some of the ingredients to make for a compelling story. There are strong setups and payoffs, the tone is constant throughout, and its setting could make for a great horror movie. Unfortunately, its characters are so one-note and it takes far too long to get to the good stuff that I can’t recommend it to even the most die-hard horror junkie.
Grade: C-minus. Not rated. Available to stream via Shudder
(Photo: Shudder)
