Visit The Beach House at Your Own Peril

North Truro, being one of the quietest and most detached parts of Cape Cod, makes a perfect setting for epidemic horror. The houses dotting shorelines feel at once stacked on top of and completely removed from one another. Even if you can see your neighbors sitting on their deck, you’re distanced from them. That eerie spatial contradiction is the key to Jeffrey A. Brown’s new movie, The Beach House, yet another oopsie-daisy horror story suited too well to the age of COVID-19, which has quite possibly left a slew of genre directors anxiously shearing down their nails like beavers on birch in response to their work’s accidental topicality.
Brown at least chose a location where coronavirus has had a lesser impact on the great state of Massachusetts compared to other parts, so maybe he’ll welcome that as a small mercy. On the other hand his protagonists, Emily (Liana Liberato) and Randall (Noah Le Gros), chose poorly. There’s no COVID-19 in The Beach House, but there is something arguably worse, and it’s in the water, which is a real “fuck you” to vacationers hoping to dip their toes in the Cape Cod Bay. The picture begins with shots submerged beneath the waves, capturing the image of billowing grey clouds of unknown origins just before cutting to the couple’s arrival at the oceanside abode where the story takes place. Emily and Randall are in a rough patch. She has great academic ambition. He has great 20-something slacker white guy ambition. Their respective goals interfere with the other’s, but Randall really wants her to hop on board with his.
“Think about it,” he mumbles. “It’d be vacation all the time. Isn’t that what we want?” Emily being a young woman in 2020, vacation all the time most certainly is not what she wants, but the conversation goes nowhere further because they’re interrupted by the arrival of Mitch (Jake Weber) and Jane (Maryann Nagel), two unexpected visitors. Though, really, Emily and Randall are the unexpected visitors: Randall’s dad, who owns the house, got his wires crossed over dates. No matter. The quartet get along mostly fine, though Randall is a self-regarding wannabe countercultural asshole and nobody at the dinner table can easily stomach his casual narcissism. Then the sickness takes hold and Emily’s the only one blessed with sense enough to do anything about it.
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