93 min | R | June 18, 2020 | Universal Pictures
An older man, a younger wife, and a quiet daughter take a modernist rental in the Welsh hills that does not measure right. The walls run longer inside than out, the hallways loop, and the house knows exactly what Theo did. The movie just doesn’t trust you to be scared by it.
Theo Conroy is a wealthy older man married to a younger actress, and they bring their young daughter to a remote rental house in Wales. The house does not measure right. Rooms run bigger inside than out, hallways loop back on themselves, and doors open onto nothing. The film is really about guilt. Theo carries the death of his first wife and a public accusation that never cleared him. David Koepp adapts Daniel Kehlmann’s novella into a haunted-house movie about a man imprisoned in a structure he built himself.
Kevin Bacon plays Theo with controlled paranoia and old jealousy. He is a man certain everyone sees the worst version of him. Bacon makes the suspicion of his young wife look like a sickness he cannot put down. Amanda Seyfried plays Susanna with a guardedness that reads as both craft and survival. She is an actress married to a man who reads her phone, and she plays the marriage as a negotiation. Avery Tiiu Essex plays Ella, the daughter, as the only honest person in the house, and the film gives these three a real family to act before stranding them in a plot that does not need them.
Koepp directs his own adaptation and reunites with Bacon two decades after Stir of Echoes. He stages the house as the real antagonist, and the production design earns the role. The interiors are cold modernist concrete and glass, all clean right angles that stop adding up. The geometry is the strongest idea in the film. Theo measures a wall and finds it longer inside than out, and Koepp shoots the reveal plainly and lets the wrongness sit without a score telling you to flinch. The screenplay then reaches for a payoff that gets explained instead of felt, and the menace turns out to be polite.
The film knows how to build a frame and does not know how to close one. The geometry, the guilt, and the failing marriage all point toward something disturbing about a man who cannot escape himself. Koepp walks the audience to the threshold and then leads them through the door by the hand. The threat explains itself and stops being a threat. There is a sharp, claustrophobic chamber piece buried in this house, and Koepp finds the house but loses the film.