THE BEACH HOUSE Is No Day At The Beach

Starring Liana Liberato, Noah Le Gros, and Jake Weber Written and Directed by Jeffrey A. Brown Shudder

What do contagion, isolation, and environmental disaster have to do with 2020? Well, pretty much everything. If you haven’t had enough of all three, you can get 87 minutes more with writer/director Jeffrey A. Brown’s THE BEACH HOUSE. Following college students Randall and Emily to his estranged father’s beach house on the northeastern coast, the film builds an atmosphere of hyperrealism as handheld shots ease the audience into the young couple’s tenuous relationship. The source of the tension? Emily wants to attend grad school for astrobiology, but Randall hopes she’ll abandon her dreams to spend a couple of years wallowing in the very beach house he has brought her to visit. The only catch is, an older couple claiming to be Randall’s family friends have already taken up residence there, and something is seriously not right with them. 

Blending drug-induced surrealism with oceanic body horror, THE BEACH HOUSE attempts an aesthetic-steeped slow burn that only teases its ultimate payoff. While props are certainly deserved by the film’s practical effects team, whose vomit-inducing depiction of a parasitic worm makes the whole experience entirely worth it, THE BEACH HOUSE ultimately fails to achieve its tonal goals. While making an effort to legitimize its strangeness with realism, the film’s oscillations between naturalistic dialogue and that which feels both stilted and incredibly unnatural get in the way of a concept with a lot of potential. 

Drawing subject-matter comparisons to both THE LIGHTHOUSE and THE MIST, Brown’s effort has a lot going for it. Yet, even with a final girl as strong-willed as Emily, the unsatisfying ending could not be redeemed. Aptly described as a ‘gross-out,’ THE BEACH HOUSE strives to be something much more. Despite its initial release in 2019, the film - like so many others - feels like a direct product of the year we have all come to know and hate.