Reviewing "The Beach House": A weird, intriguing horror film with tons of surreal ambiguity

The Beach house is a horror film directed by Jeffrey A. Brown and starring Liana Liberato as Emily. Emily and her boyfriend Randall go to a beach house owned by Randall's parents, and while there, realize that an older couple, Mitch and Jane, friends of Randall's parents, are already staying there. The four decide to get high and during that time, they notice a strong fog rolling in. Jane gets lost on the beach in the fog and Mitch goes off to find her. In the morning, she returns with boils all over her skin, and strange things start happening...

The film features some visceral close-up body horror, and while not exceedingly graphic, it is still bound to make you cringe and squirm due to the subject matter. In this respect, it is similar to another film I have reviewed, Sea Fever. While that was set on a ship and focused on the conflict between immediate quarantine and hospitalization, and had a student who was uniquely qualified to at least help to contain the situation, The Beach House feels even more Lovecraftian, in that Emily, while interested in organic chemistry, cannot really do much to help out the situation, and is reduced to scrambling for survival against an all-consuming terror that warps and twists the bodies of those it infects. There is no containing it, only barely escaping a grisly fate again and again.

Liana Liberato plays Emily with a sort of quick-witted resourcefulness but also shows her to act like what you would expect someone of her age to act. This makes for some pretty interesting scenes early on when she initially refuses to get high on Randall's suggestion, but ultimately gives in, and shows that while she supports Randall, she disapproves of his behavior and only goes along with most of it thanks to external pressures while she has greater aspirations.

The thrills are solid, with some definite nauseating scenes and some inexplicably strange body horror going on, with only minimal explanation. This helps put the viewer in Emily's shoes, being just as clueless as she is when it come to what exactly is happening around her.

While the start is a little slow for my liking, I still found The Beach House a very interesting and bleak story, with a generally unsettling atmosphere and a pretty good lead performance.

Score: 8/10