The Beach House: Low-Budget Horror Makes Hay from H.P. Lovecraft Tradition

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B-

Horror movies tend to be moralistic, offering wildly disproportionate punishment for mundane transgressions. What’s mildly interesting about The Beach House, the low-budget debut feature from Jeffrey A Brown is that, while human beings have their struggles and conflicts, the universe doesn’t much care.

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The story starts as scruff-ball Randall (Noah Le Gros) arrives at his family’s East Coast seaside home with his college girlfriend, Emily (Liana Liberato). The two have been having differences about their future plans and the trip to the beach house is aimed at a romantic reconciliation. Randall has recently dropped out of university and wants to go on a permanent vacation, while Emily wants to go to grad school and study astrobiology, or the nature of life in the universe.

What she sees in him isn’t clear but in any case, they go to bed together. When they wake up, they realize there are other people in the house. It’s nothing too horrifying: Just a middle-aged couple, Mitch (Jake Weber) and Jane (Maryann Nagel), who were given permission to stay there by Randall’s dad. Judging by the medicine cabinet full of pill bottles, Jane is seriously ill. The two couples decide to cohabit for the weekend. All of them except Emily slurp back some oysters, and Randall annoys her when he suggests they finish the dinner with some marijuana edibles.

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When they walk outside the beach house, the trees appear to be covered with phosphorescent blue goo; one of several examples of successful budget-stretching psychedelic visuals. Alas, by morning, things go bad very quickly, with a stinky fog, gooey parasites in the water, and things embedding themselves in people’s bodies. And forget calling for help. The sputtering communication devices indicate life on the entire planet is in the midst of a catastrophic collapse.

As Emily, Liberato’s big eyes, baby cheeks, and a rangy athletic frame serve the role of the Final Girl. But pretty much anything involving the human interactions seems like a red herring here. True to the H.P. Lovecraft tradition, the cosmos is indifferent to humans, who are snuffed out of existence as easily as they fell into it, and our existence hangs by a thread. If there’s another takeaway, perhaps you should avoid doing drugs or oysters with friends of your parents. Sure, it could be weird fun, but it could also trigger a slimy apocalypse.

The Beach House. Written and directed by Jeffrey A. Brown. Starring Liana Liberato, Noah Le Gros, Jack Weber and Maryann Nagel. Available July 9 on AMC’s streaming platform, Shudder which is available for free for a seven-day trial period.