Hellraiser Reboot Is More Hazy Dream than Vivid Nightmare

David Bruckner’s The Night House wrings horror from a sort of psychological optical illusion: As a grieving woman played by Rebecca Hall creeps around her lonely home, she catches glimpses and shadows of something unsettling and sinister, somewhere beyond the veil. Bruckner and his screenwriting collaborators Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski therefore seemed ideally suited for a new version of Hellraiser. Clive Barker’s 1987 original, based on his own novella, is a strange and singular creation, unlike just about any horror movie of its time (or any other), but it shares with The Night House a compulsion to peel away layers of humdrum reality and find the gruesome nightmares underneath. (Granted, Barker’s peeling process is a lot wetter and more crackly than Bruckner’s.) Barker’s S&M-tinged mythology is unsettling precisely because his human characters often seek it out, in search of some new, heretofore undiscovered sensuality. The Night House characters are arguably doing the same with their grieving and despair.
One point in favor of Bruckner’s new Hellraiser is that it takes some time before it feels truly lost. A point against is that it takes some time before it does almost anything. Still, barely-recovering addict Riley (Odessa A’zion) is a more immediately compelling character than any of the humans in Barker’s movie, and her conflict with her brother and roommate Matt (Brandon Flynn) has a messy rawness that’s arguably missing from the earlier version’s joyless love triangle. Desperate for cash, fuming at her judgmental brother and involved with a fellow addict named Trevor (Drew Starkey), Riley agrees to break into a long-abandoned storage container and sell its contents. As it turns out, this includes a single item: A strange three-dimensional puzzle box with a series of knife-y surprises. When the box causes Riley to hallucinate and, seemingly, Matt to disappear, she becomes obsessed with tracking down its owner.
It takes close to an hour of this set-up and detective work to lead into what seems to be the main event: Riley, Trevor, Matt’s boyfriend Colin (Adam Faison) and roommate Nora (Aoife Hinds) arriving at a remote mansion owned by a missing rich man—sort of a posh version of Saw or Escape Room. There are some human-laid traps, but moreover, the box has summoned Cenobites, a group of extra-dimensional beings, led by the Hell Priest (Jamie Clayton), known to horror fans, as well as probably some video-box-art connoisseurs, as Pinhead.