Dylan Minette is in a high point of his young career at the moment, currently between seasons of hit Netflix show 13 Reasons Why, and now he teams up with the streaming giants in the horror thriller The Open House. In it, Minette plays Logan, a teenager who moves into a relative’s vacant holiday home on a mountain with his mother (Piercey Dalton) after the death of his father.
A horror movie about a family moving into a new house and a dead family member? Sounds awfully familiar, huh? Yeah. The most terrifying image you’ll see in this movie comes two minutes in, which is a close-up of Logan taking his contact lenses off.
The first half or so of the film had some scenes that play up the anxiety factor quite effectively, using a play on lights and camera angles to stoke up tension. But for every one of those scenes, you get two of either: two characters run into each other, they react in shock, and you get a loud musical note telling you to be scared; or a scene with generic creepy music playing as literally nothing happens.
The problem is that this film doesn’t seem to quite understand what is or isn’t scary; it just knows it’s supposed to be frightening. So the film throws in the cliches. The thuds and random noises, things moving from room to room on its own. Thing is, when you look at it in the context of the movie, these little things make no sense. They shouldn’t happen, unless the antagonist of the movie deliberately goes out of their way to mass with the family. Imagine a stranger hiding in your basement sneaking around and hiding your phone, or knocking on doors just to mess with you. And this is supposed to be terrifying.
It also employs some side characters to add to the anxiety factor. One of them actually do work to this end, but the other, continuing the theme, does things that make no sense to the plot of the film. What this character does is only done to throw the audience off, and simply would not be done if this wasn’t a movie with an audience that is supposed to be “scary.”
As it moves towards the third act, the movie falls apart. Act two ends with a big confrontation scene, with terrible characterization and terrible dialogue, emblematic of the film as a whole, which is then very quickly treated as if it never happens. The third act turns into a home invasion film, that is almost completely detached from the rest of the movie. There were scenes setting this up, but the first two acts of the film could’ve been anything else and it would’ve made as much effect.
Also, I’m not much of a stickler for rules in writing, I don’t usually care, but this film commits the most egregious violation of Chekhov’s gun I’ve ever seen. It’s not that the proverbial gun was shown and never fired, it’s that it was shown, and shown again, and shown again, it’s annoying at this point, and then shown again, and it never went off. Although the movie’s attempts to be unpredictable is appreciated, it is also ineffective.
The film best describes itself by how it goes about establishing when the open house event is supposed to happen in the film. At one point it was supposed to be 11 am, then it was 10 am. Then later in the film there was supposed to be another one, except it was after 1 pm, but then it doesn’t seem like it happened at all. It’s a mess, it’s inconsistent with itself, and in the end it may as well have not happened at all.
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