Rebecca Hall (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, The Prestige) has definitely come a long way since her first onscreen appearance at the age of 10 in the TV adaptation of The Camomile Lawn directed by her father. Numerous credits in movies of all sizes and genres and Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations have marked her journey as an actor. And by now, she managed to completely silence voices whispering about her fortunate start and back-wind in the industry.
She has proven to be a versatile actor of extraordinary drive and commitment and has also directed her first feature film, Passing (2021). Hall opened up to Variety about the process of adapting Nella Larsen’s novel by saying, “I think I sort of vomited out the first draft in 10 days,” she says. “And then I was terrified of it. It sat on my computer. I was like, ‘What did I just do?’” Her directorial debut ended up earning multiple SAG and Golden Globe nominations last year.
But how come that as an actor, she is quickly rising to fame as a heroine of horrors and psychological thrillers these days? She says one of her biggest fears is losing her mind. Well, the characters she has been recently portraying are tipping on the verge of right that.
The Night House
Hall is excellent at creating characters dealing with mourning. She plays Christine Chubbuck in Christine (2016), where her ill-fated character grieves the person she had hopes of becoming, the life she expected herself to live. In The Night House (2021), the haunted house thriller-horror, her character goes through a very specific period of the grieving process, rage. She is furious at her late husband and yearns to see him again.
The story is about Beth (Rebecca Hall), a recent widow mourning her husband (Evan Jonigkeit), alone in a lake house he has built for her in upstate New York. She begins to dig into his unexpected death and uncover his disturbing secrets while battling with her own inner life and daunting nightmares. “What drew me to this role, I don’t know. I don’t know, probably I must be out of my mind. It is probably the fact that I had to do most of it on my own. Seemed quite intriguing. I have never done anything like that before. But then, in retrospect, it was a crazy idea.” Hall told Good Morning America.
Beth is an angry, intense, confrontational character. She is in “nowhere land.” The funeral is over, but the lengthy period of slowly moving on while still grieving has not started yet. David Bruckner’s (The Ritual) piece captures a particular and barely explored period of grief. Beth is unstable, depressed, and wants to be haunted. Her marriage spanned for almost 15 years, yet new revelations about her late husband shake her to the core. Her assumption that she knew him is shattered to pieces. She turns reckless, starts drinking, and has nightmares that blur the lines between fiction and reality.
Hall told Collider about her first-ever read-through of the script: “I was definitely trepidatious. There was this scene at the beginning. My character is a school teacher, and this parent comes in. When I read that scene in the script, I was pretty much hooked just because I’ve realized at that point that this character had a lot of humor and was quite unusual for a heroine in an old-fashioned ghost story.”
The Night House is an atmospheric horror with unnerving, fresh twists, and stylish visuals. It is a well-crafted, highly ambitious picture that sometimes fails to live up to its own expectations yet delivers a progressive, smart, and emotionally-charged end result. The screenplay (written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski) deals with lots of massive existentialist, intellectual and conceptual questions. After all, the villain really is no one and nothing.
Hall gives an electrifying, all-in, courageous performance that drives the film the entire time. And she doubled down on the very same in this year’s Resurrections. She is fearless and compelling in The Night House and portrays yet another intense horror heroine in her new movie.
Resurrections
The new piece of Andrew Semans (Nancy, Please) is a story about Margaret (Rebecca Hall). She is a successful professional with a perfectly controlled life and a sleek apartment. She is also a single mother to a teenage daughter (Grace Kaufman). Everything goes according to plan until one day, a mysterious and sinister older man (Tim Roth) starts appearing in her environment. She rapidly comes to believe that he has returned to her from the past in order to bring fear and violence to her and her daughter’s world. In the horror-tinged thriller, Hall portrays a woman haunted by her own traumas.
The film evokes parental fear. What if you fail at taking care of your child? What if you are unable to prevent your child from being hurt or victimized? Resurrection also explores how manipulative, toxic, sometimes even sadistic people create and cement intense emotional bonds with their victims and control their every move. Hall portrays Margaret as a woman of elegance, dignity, and pride throughout the story.
“Rebecca is so prepared, insightful, and committed. She understood the script and the character so well and came so ready to perform that frequently we wouldn’t have any discussing at all about a scene. That we would just light it and roll the camera, and she would perform, and I would be a very appreciative observer. It was incredibly easy because she brought it all with her,” Semans opened up about his leading lady in a recent interview to uninterview.
Overall, Rebecca Hall has definitely tapped into something when it comes to taking on complex, angry yet broken women who are dealing with both inner and outer struggles and fears. She has recently told Variety: “I’m more me when I’m directing than anything else,” so who knows, soon there might be a horror appearing on our radar directed by Hall herself.
The Night House is available to stream on Prime Video and VUDU. IFC Films will release Resurrection in theaters and on VOD.