The Night House (2020 film)

Beth has just lost her husband Owen to suicide. Devastated, she spends her nights drinking and going through Owen's belongings. Her friend Claire and neighbour Mel are concerned for her. Owen's ominous suicide note—"You were right. There is nothing. Nothing is after you. You're safe now."—perplexes her. She begins to suffer from strange supernatural events at night and finds a strange reversed floor plan for their house. One night, she discovers a photo on his phone of a woman who looks similar to her, and suspects Owen was having an affair. A drunken Beth reveals to Claire that she had been clinically dead for four minutes after a car accident years ago and saw that there was nothing when she died. Owen had always disagreed with this and was close to changing her mind before he died. That night, she is awakened by a supernatural presence and witnesses several frightened women fleeing through the woods and jumping into the lake. She finds blood on the boat where Owen shot himself and feels an invisible presence. Crossing the lake to investigate a strange set of lights, she discovers a reversed copy of her house and sees ghostly figures of women with Owen. She passes out and awakens in her own house. She finds the reversed house again, although this time it is unfinished and empty. She retrieves a strange statue from it and confronts Mel, who claims he never saw the house but once saw Owen in the woods at night with a woman who looked like Beth. Searching Owen's laptop, she finds more photos of women who look similar to her, identifies the statue from one of his books as an occult voodoo doll, and determines that Owen was trying to learn how to trick and trap demonic entities. Beth finds the bookstore where Owen bought the books and encounters Madelyne, one of the women from Owen's photos, who denies sleeping with him. Madelyne tells Beth how Owen had invited her to the reverse house. He kissed her, then attempted to choke her, but apologized after she panicked, and drove her back home. A drunk Beth visits the reverse house, and under the floorboards finds the bodies of the women Owen had photographed. An invisible force manifests physical signs of itself, as it caresses Beth. Mistaking it for Owen's spirit, she hugs it back. The spirit is not Owen; and it violently shows her visions of Owen murdering the Beth lookalikes. Using Owen's likeness to communicate "Nothing" is revealed to be a manifestation of Death itself, which tried to convince Owen to return Beth to the afterlife by killing her. Owen's construction of the reverse house and murder of the lookalikes tricked death, though only temporarily. In response to her previously escaping it in her near-death experience, and having driven Owen to suicide, it is now stalking Beth directly. It traps her in a position like the statue she had retrieved earlier. In the morning, Claire arrives and sees evidence of a fight in the house. She rushes out to the dock with Mel, where they find Beth out in the boat with Owen's gun. In Nothing's dimension, the entity tries to convince Beth to join it by killing herself, but Beth puts the gun down, deciding not to commit suicide. As soon as she moves the gun away from herself, she returns to the real world, where Claire is swimming toward the boat to save her. Once ashore, Beth sees the outline of the entity in the boat. Mel says, "There's nothing there," to which Beth replies, "I know". == Symbolism ==