THE NIGHT HOUSE

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NOTE: This spoiler was submitted by Jeremy

A woman named Beth (Rebecca Hall) has just lost her husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) to suicide. He has left her a lakeside home where she starts to stay in order to process her grief. For a moment, she feels as though there is a shadowy image behind her. After sleeping there for the night, she goes to the dock where Owen’s boat was, the same one he used in his final moments.

Beth works as a high school teacher. She is visited by Becky (Samantha Buck), the mother of one of her students, Hunter. She comes to protest a C grade that Hunter got for his final assignment, which had been graded while Beth was out grieving. When pressed further by Becky, Beth explains to her how Owen took the boat out into the lake along with a handgun and shot himself through the mouth. Becky is left feeling guilty and accepts a B grade for Hunter. Later that night, she goes to a grief counseling session with her best friend Claire (Sarah Goldberg).

While staying at the house, Beth finds floor plans for the house, indicating that Owen was building something there before he died. Later that night, Beth starts to hear music playing from downstairs. She gets a text from Owen’s phone that tells her to go downstairs. When she calls the phone, the music stops and she hears what sounds like Owen’s voice telling her to look out the window. Beth goes to the window and looks outside to see what appears to be Owen standing naked by the beach. Beth then wakes up from this dream. She goes to find Owen’s phone and opens it to see that there were no other texts from him besides the last one he left before his death. As she looks through his phone some more, Beth comes across a picture of a woman in a bookstore who looks almost exactly like her.

The next day, Beth joins Claire and some friends for drinks. Although they try to avoid the subject of Owen’s death, it comes up and Claire mentions that he left a suicide note. It reads, “You were right. There is nothing. Nothing is after you. You’re safe now.” Claire takes Beth back to the lake house where Beth tells Claire that she once had an accident where she was dead for four minutes, and she told Owen that she saw “nothing” in that time, feeling like she was going through an endless tunnel, and she thinks that’s what Owen was implying in his note. Beth appears to fall asleep by herself with Claire seemingly having disappeared. She is drawn outside by what sounds like Owen’s voice again. She goes to the dock and finds bloody footprints that appear to be walking toward her. Beth reaches her hand out and feels something. When she goes back toward the house, she sees herself and Owen in the bedroom window, with Owen trying to kiss Beth, but she pulls away from him. When Beth runs back to the house, it is morning, and she finds herself sleeping on the couch, and in turn, she awakens from the dream again.

Beth wanders through the woods that day and comes across the space that Owen was working on. She runs into a neighbor, Mel (Vondie Curtis-Hall), who is walking his dog and expresses concern over Beth going out by herself, knowing what she is going through and fearing she may do something reckless. Mel invites Beth over for lunch, where he later tells her that he did see Owen around the area with a woman that he thought was Beth, but when he called out to her, he saw it wasn’t her. She goes through Owen’s phone and belongings, finding more pictures of the woman from the bookstore, as well as other women who bear a resemblance to Beth (Caucasian brunette woman). There is even an artifact called a Louvre Doll, which looks like a human figure impaled with 13 needles.

Beth visits the bookstore and meets the employee Madelyne (Stacy Martin), the woman in Owen’s pictures. Beth talks to her and reveals that she was Owen’s wife and what happened to him, and Madelyne all but confirms that she did spend time with Owen. When Beth returns home, she continues to be haunted by what she thinks is Owen’s silhouette.

Later on, Madelyne visits Beth since Owen had also taken her to the lake house before. Madelyne tells Beth that she had only kissed Owen, not slept with him, but he had attempted to choke her and she got away in time.

Beth goes to the unfinished shed that Owen was working on and her foot goes through a floorboard. There, Beth uncovers the corpses of several women, presumably the women in Owen’s photos. Beth tries calling Claire to tell her, but she just leaves her a tearful voicemail trying to deny what Owen really was.

In her continued grief and delusions, Beth continues to feel Owen’s presence and begins to break down as she just wants to be able to feel him again. The invisible force from earlier returns, and Beth appears to be able to hold and kiss it. When she asks the force if it’s Owen, it replies that it isn’t. Beth walks to the couch and sees Owen himself but speaking with the voice of some kind of demon that claims it was using Owen to carry out the killings, and that it had its eyes on Beth the whole time. She sees an image in the mirror of Owen attacking and killing another woman.

The next morning, Claire goes to the house to look for Beth, but she has taken Owen’s boat and handgun out to the lake, looking like she is possessed and about to kill herself. Claire calls out to Beth loud enough to draw Mel’s attention. Claire swims out to the boat just as Beth appears to snap out of her delusion. She swims back to the dock with Claire to meet Mel, and they both attempt to comfort her. Beth looks out to the lake and seemingly still sees the shadow of the demon, but when Mel asks what she is looking at, Beth says it’s nothing.


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Following the suicide of her husband Owen, a woman named Beth stays at the lake house he left for her while she processes her grief. Through her time there, she thinks that she feels Owen's presence around her, but she starts to learn other things about her late husband.

Owen had an apparent obsession with women like Beth or those that looked like her. His last affair was with a bookstore employee named Madelyne, whom Beth meets and is later told by her that Owen had tried to strangle her. Beth later uncovers a hidden floor space in an unfinished part of the house where she finds multiple corpses of women that she had seen in pictures on Owen's phone. Following a breakdown, Beth thinks she is talking to Owen's spirit, but it is actually some kind of malicious demonic entity that apparently possessed Owen into killing those women until he could get to Beth.

Beth goes out to the lake to commit suicide the same way Owen did, but she is stopped by her best friend Claire, who snaps her out of her delusion in time. It appears as though Beth might be ready to move on and let go as she no longer sees the "spirit" following her.