It is a rare occurrence to find a movie that speaks so clearly to its current moment like “The Beach House,” despite being filmed months before COVID-19 ravaged our lives, homes, and beaches. Part Lovecraft and part virus flick, it fits right into the category of movies such as “Long Weekend,” “The Mist,” and “The Last Winter,” where small groups of people meet an extinction event that can’t be stopped.
The film opens to an ocean glistening in the morning sun. The camera then dives below the surface, sinking deeper and deeper until it hits rock bottom–a chaotic swirl of ink, sand, and something else. Like “Blue Velvet’s” infamous opener, where David Lynch’s camera tracks below a sea of small-town conformity to find beetles strangely, savagely killing each other, the opening shot here is a creepy reminder of why appearances are not to be trusted. Especially when your favorite vacation spot is abandoned.
When college hotties Randal and Emily (Noah Le Gros and Liana Liberato) arrive in town, no one is around. So what? Randal’s father is lending them his beach house, which gives the horny couple some much needed alone time after a semester away. But then, of course, a strange virus has to come along and ruin everything.
What follows is a series of events that drive a wedge between Randal and Emily, a relationship on the verge of drowning. It turns out an older pair of guests, Mitch and Jane (Jake Weber and Maryann Nagal), are already staying at the house, though for different reasons. This is likely their last hoorah, what with Jane’s sickness, and you get the sense that neither couple is going to last till the end of the vacation. Tensions ebb and flow like the tides, a metaphor that becomes literal after phosphorescent particles leave the ocean and swirl around Charleston at night. Also, a blue fog rolls through town and clouds judgments.
Writer-director Jeffery A. Brown takes a lot of time with the set up to “The Beach House.” Some of the movie’s best scenes come early, as the film establishes Emily as a smart and curious heroine. There’s a richness to the way she questions what’s happening around her. She knows a thing or two about oceans (her major is astrobiology), which is more than can be said for her fellow guests: Randal is a cloddish dude, Jane a senseless sick person, Mitch a laid back dad. The words “final girl” might as well be stamped on her forehead.
Once the action ramps up, the aforementioned stereotypes become a bit of a drag, with characters wandering into the same old basements and doing the same old stupid horror character stuff (why go for a swim when you know the ocean is frothing with parasites?). That said, Brown and his effects team do a remarkable job with the threat, capturing the way a virus is impossible to outrun once in the air and water. When it’s working–which is often– “The Beach House” is a terrifying addition to the extinction event sub-genre, where small towns meet big threats, where nature becomes a merciless villain, and where narrative and scientific coherence are as important as the characters themselves.
Ultimately, “The Beach House” is chilling enough that it doesn’t need a global pandemic to make its own pandemic alarming. While this virus rots flesh like a fish on dry land, it’s no less scary than what’s going on outside our own doors. The only way to beat any kind of virus, Emily learns, is to adapt. [B-]
“The Beach House” is available now on Shudder.