PLOT: Randall (Noah Le Gos) and Emily (Liana Liberato) visit his father’s beach house in Cape Cod for a weekend getaway to mend their fraying relationship. When the older couple Mitch (Jake Weber) and Jane (Maryann Nagel) arrives unexpectedly, the foursome faces a mystifying oceanic organism.
REVIEW: With two prior short films to help hone his directorial craft, longtime location manager Jeffery A. Brown (SPIDER-MAN 3, THE WOLF OF WALL STREET) makes his feature debut with THE BEACH HOUSE (WATCH IT HERE), a suspensefully-mounted four-hander of baleful bacterial body-horror that gets to the heart of the universal fear we all share when it comes to the ocean’s mystifying microbiology. Namely, that we have absolutely no f*cking clue what deleterious organisms lie beneath the surface. While hardly reinventing the subgenre – Brown himself has publicly cited such genre classics as ALIEN, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, SHIVERS, and others as inspiration – but the movie really belongs more on the cheaper side of the neighborhood where THE MIST, THE FOG, and THE BAY reside. If you dig those flicks, you’ll likely find merit in investing 85 minutes to the atmospheric unrest and chest-palpitating tension the film increasingly emits. A few trampled horror tropes and a cliché or two aside, even it if won’t permanently last once you leave, THE BEACH HOUSE is certainly worth a visit when it hits Shudder on July 9, 2020.
Randall and Emily arrive in sunny Cape Cod to an empty town during the tourism off-season. They plan to rekindle their romance by enjoying a quiet getaway at a beach house owned by Randall’s father. Emily is a whip-smart astrobiology major in college, which is why she’s disappointed in Randall’s indifference to attending school and earning a degree at all. In fact, Randall would rather live in Cape Cod year-round. After a night alone, Emily wakes up to find an elderly lady in the house. It turns out Randall did not tell his father he was going to stay at the house, and his father didn’t tell Randall that he offered his friends Mitch and Jane to enjoy the beach house. To the dismay of both women, Randall agrees to allow Mitch and Jane to stay. After eating oysters for dinner, the foursome imbibes edible marijuana, which trips the hell out of the overly-medicated Jane. After spotting iridescent sea-mist in the air, Mitch takes a walk and doesn’t return until the following day, at which point he voices that something strange and sinister is most definitely afoot among their surroundings.
An effluvial stench takes hold of the foursome the next day, as does an internal illness that affects each person in different ways. It seems whatever is causing the sickness has infiltrated the pipes in the house. In the best performance of the film by far, Emily begins to use her education to discover what the hell is going on and try to protect herself accordingly. What the movie does really well is the way it calibrates the tension and suspense as the story unfolds, offering just enough info to keep us invested in the underlying mystery along the way, ultimately devolving into gouging and grisly body-horror by the final reel. Two standout scenes include Emily encountering something truly alarming on the shoreline, as well as a doubly-disgusting discovery inside a neighbor’s basement. The ending of the film is also pretty ballsy, replete with a mortifying final shot of the film that will likely stay with you longer than the 84-preceding minutes.
And that is one of the biggest issues with the film: staying power. Because of the short runtime and the time it takes to truly show its cards, the film is likely to slight and inconsequential to last in your mind beyond the time spent watching it. The first 40-minutes are all set-up and slow character exposition, leaving just 45-minutes or so for the real horror to hit home. Moreover, because the movie borrows from the aforementioned classics, not to mention a slew of 50s sci-fi monster-movie tenets and iconography, it becomes more about the execution of the story rather than the exciting novelty of it. That said, the overarching premise about the mysterious nature of the sea and its vast unknown species will always be a fascinating subject for humankind. Here the fear of the unknown escalates in a proportionate dose of terror, offering unsettling glimpses of the physical manifestation of the cryptic sea-organism responsible. The special effects in this regard are pretty impressive for such a low-budget production shepherded by a first-time filmmaker. Puppeteer Paul Rice (I AM LEGEND, NOAH) and Visual Effects Supervisor Lucien Harriot (HEREDITARY, UNCUT GEMS) add invaluable contributions to the film.
In the end, THE BEACH HOUSE may not reinvent the wheel, but it has an alarming and amusing time tugging and twisting until the tension nearly breaks it in half. Bolstered by fine performances led by Liberto and the deftly tuned suspense from Brown, all underscored by the ubiquitous Thalassophobia (fear of the ocean) nearly everyone can relate to, THE BEACH HOUSE is a well-made feature debut from a director with a promising future. However, much like the tides it depicts, the film may wash over you and instantly disappear like a wave on the shore.