The Beach House - Slow and Steady (and parasitic and sandy) Wins the Race
For my first film review for Horror Bound, I decided to tackle one of Shudder’s latest releases, The Beach House (2019). For the most part, I’ve loved the original horrors Shudder has released in the last year, so I strapped in for the The Beach House, ready for another banger. An ecological body horror is right up my alley and I tend to love them all, good or ‘bad’. However, I found The Beach House to be a bit difficult to assign a solid rating to. It had so many amazing elements, but a lot of others that countered their successes.
Some spoilers ahead!
The plot to the cryptic, crawling thriller The Beach House, Jeffrey A. Brown’s directorial debut, is very familiar – a couple heads to an isolated area for a nice holiday during off-season, frightening, inexplicable things start to happen, and chaos ensues. From the beginning the audience is made to feel uncomfortable, unrelated to any monsters or other terrors. When college-couple Emily (Liana Liberato) and Randall (Noah Le Gros) arrive at Randall’s parents’ beach house, they find it to be occupied by friends of Randall’s mother and father, Mitch (Jake Weber) and Jane (Maryann Nagel). This small wrench in the works is foreshadowing for the subsequent disturbances catalysed by sink water turned what I can only describe as ‘goopy’ and mysterious creatures appearing on the beach.
Jane is the first in the house to become inexplicably ill, but the audience can deduce why. Over explanation seems to be a recurring motif in The Beach House – as much as you want to figure things out alongside the characters, there is far too much overt exposition for that to be true. From the very beginning, we learn all about Emily from one conversation, about her background in science and astrobiology and her fascination with how organisms can adapt to even the most extreme environments.
From this we can discern that at some point, a creature very well adapted to extreme environments will be woven into the story. Beyond the fact that the film has few surprise elements, it has so much gold to consider before deciding whether the film is good, bad, or bad good bad (so bad that it is good).
The Beach House is shot beautifully, and the cinematography pairs well with how slow moving the movie is. Both the film and the long shots drag, but this is incredibly effective in building the drama until everything kicks off in the last twenty minutes. Mitch is the second to go, walking off into the ocean and never reappearing. This scene is one of my favourites in the film – it is absolutely stunning. Emily calls out for Mitch as he sinks into the sea, steps on the tentacles of what looks like a giant man-o-war and becomes infected with a parasite. She runs into the house and the body horror elements of the film start to get really good.
I love body horror, especially when parasites are involved, and watching Emily remove the parasite from her foot was really satisfying (says me, a grade-A weirdo). Upon returning to the house, she finds that Randall has now become infected too, and the clock starts ticking in the race against time to save his life.
The rest of the film, no matter how hard it tries to keep the plot, loses it, and it becomes a misdirected scramble for survival that I weirdly didn’t hate, as I felt like this is exactly what would happen if you were infected by an alien parasite – confusion and chaos. This doesn’t mean the film is bad, as it was fully saved by the excellent antagonist – a parasitic creature from the sea that goes through as many corporeal evolutions as a pokemon, and I loved that. I won’t give anymore monster-descriptions away, because to me, it is the film’s shining savior and what bumped it up a star.
The ecological commentary was clear, as it is in most eco-horrors – mother earth is powerful, and if you mess with her she is going to get you. What I also loved about the creature is that it was never presented as evil or vindictive. It was an organism adapting to an extreme environment (thanks, Emily), just trying to survive, not unlike Emily and Randall.
I did enjoy this film, despite the slow (very slow) burn. It was beautifully shot with a color palette reminiscent of both It Follows and Color Out of Space, the latter also being an eco-body horror (and easily my favorite film of 2019 – I have a large poster from the movie on my wall and Nic Cage’s face is extra huge, if you wanted proof). The creatures were phenomenal, and I thoroughly enjoyed all of the goopy parasitic puking that took place as the story unfolded. If you are into slow burners or love corporeal transgression via parasite, give The Beach House a go.
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