The Beach House: Worth a Watch?

You may come to Shudder's new original The Beach House expecting Cabin Fever, but the end result is decidedly more Colour out of Space. But is the sci-fi contagion freak out worth a watch?

A note on spoilers - The hits and misses sections are completely spoiler free zones. If you've seen the film, scroll down to the cliché count to see which horror topes we're dealing with and the questions and theories section to find out what the hell happened in the final scene.

The Beach House's hits

• We don't often get hard sci-fi in horror - but the central concept of the movie rivals the ideas in Annihilation and Coherence and is pretty intiguing. It's an intimate story with cosmic implications.
• The film is full of surprises and some of the directions it takes are completely unexpected. First-time director Jeffrey A. Brown told Film Festival Today he 'didn’t want the viewer to anticipate what the next scene was going to be' - and he's totally achieved this.
• The cinematography and locations are near-perfect. The movie was filmed at one of the producer's father's cabins in Cape Cod, Massachusetts in the off-season - somehow the music and cinematography endow this staggeringly beautiful backdrop with real menace.
• For those who are all about the body horror, there's a fantastically squirm inducing sequence around the halfway mark which doesn't disappoint.

The Beach House's misses

• Multiple plot points are left deliberately unexplained - great if ambiguity is your jam, but potentially annoying if not.
• A lot of character threads are picked up in the first act, and then promptly jettisoned when shit goes down. 
• There's a certain coyness about the film - which I imagine is due to budget constraints. A lot of the contagion-based stuff is just characters looking clammy and saying they feel bad.
• For me the film's pace sagged in the final act. The plot is thrilling as events quickly escalate, but it's almost as if the movie doesn't know what to do next, with the final 20 minutes or so mainly comprised of sweating, stumbling and groaning.
• There's a conflict between the film's complex sci-fi ideas and some of the more B movie tropey elements that come out to play in the climax.

Cliché count

• A couple head to a cabin conveniently miles away from anyone that could help them for some quality time together. As seen in Evil Dead 2, Gerald's Game, Honeymoon, etc., etc.
• A staticy radio is tuned to Exposition FM, where some scientists have figured out exactly what is going on just 24 hours into the crisis.
• Zombies! The twist that the contagion turns people into zombies is great, but if you think about it the zombies have no business being in this movie. If the fog is all about more primitive forms of life than complex carbon organisms, why does it make people violent?

Questions and theories

• So here's what I think is happening: primitive microbial forms of life have been released from within the ocean (I think because of a rise in temperature due to global warming). This will turn the planet into an 'apocalyptic event' - similar to other planets in our solar system where the atmosphere is full of gases that are hostile to life as we know it. 
• The escalating crisis also looks to be linked to Jane's (Maryann Nagel) deteriorating mental state. The idea of Earth reverting to unknowable, primitive forms of life like those found deep beneath the ocean runs in parallel to the Jane that Mitch (Jake Weber) knows slowly disappearing. This is also linked to Emily's (Liano Liberato) growing disillusionment with her own relationship - is Randall (Noah Le Gros) still the man she fell in love with now he's dropped out of college and is trying to force her to give up her own ambitions to be with him?
• Where the fuck did Mitch go? I can accept that on a symbolic level he's surrendering himself to the ocean/the unknowable as Emily does in the final scene, but did he just leave his wife to die in the cabin?
• I guess we'll never know more about Randall's academic dad Doc, despite him being mentioned frequently in the first act. Was he somehow aware of the shit that was going on along this stretch of coast, hence the beach house here?
• So the dead squid things that Emily steps in that turn out to have worm parasites in them - what is their connection to the killer fog? Your guess is as good as mine.
• Does the final scene - Emily on the brink of turning into a zombie repeating "don't be scared" like a mantra - imply a level of acceptance? Is our final thought that the end of humanity is a natural evolution for the planet? Getting kind of Girl With All the Gifts vibes here.

Looking for more Shudder gems to watch? Why not try 2014's psychologically nasty haunted house flick The Canal.

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