Main cast: Noah Le Gros (Randall), Liana Liberato (Emily), Maryann Nagel (Jane), and Jake Weber (Mitch)
Director: Jeffrey A Brown
Randall and Emily are a young couple that are facing some issues in their relationship, so Randall brings her to his father’s beach house for a romantic break from it all. They find that his father has apparently allowed an older couple, Jane and Mitch, to stay there in the meantime. No matter, the house is big enough for all of them anyway… that is, until strange and macabre things begin to happen around them.
It’s hard to describe the plot of The Beach House in more detail, because the bulk of the sort-of good stuff happens only in the later half of the movie and hence any mention would be a big spoiler, and also because nothing about the strange happenings here is truly explained even in the end. The best I can say is that the supernatural events here lean more towards a mix of cosmic and body horror.
Don’t get too excited, though. The “horror” parts, as I’ve mentioned are crammed only in the later half of the movie, and even then, the “scary” efforts mostly consist of annoying stroboscope-like effects. There are a few really good practical effects here, especially a gruesome one involving a worm burrowing into a character’s foot, but perhaps because of budget constraints, these scenes are few indeed.
For the most part, the movie plods along like some drama about love and life. Unfortunately, despite so much time spent trying to build up tension and perhaps to get me to care about the main characters, the characters still remain pretty much distant, cold, and even at times blank slates. Emily is perhaps the most developed character here, but that’s not saying much, really. Far too much of the movie is spent on these characters exchanging boring and overdone lines about relationships, or engaging in cryptic conversations that are probably designed to be foreshadowing or something.
Frankly, they should have just cut down the first half, to make this a shorter, more tightly paced affair. I am bored during the first half or so of this movie, and perk up a bit when the fun things start happening. Even then, the fun things end abruptly after a while, without offering me much context or reason to care about what I have just watched. I have only more questions by the time the credits roll, but sadly, I realize I don’t really care enough about the movie to want to figure out the answers.
