The House at the End of the Lane.
Yeah. Cool title.
It immediately evokes a particular corner of exploitation and horror cinema for me: The Last House on the Left, The Last House on Dead End Street, even The House on the Edge of the Park. Not because Jason Figgis’ film is especially similar to any of them, but because there’s something inherently ominous about those titles. You hear one and immediately imagine some horrible place you probably shouldn’t go near.
Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where the comparison ends.
Those movies aren't all great movies. Some are ugly, crude and deeply flawed. But they're memorable. In the case of The Last House on the Left, iconic.
I’m struggling to think of much about The House at the End of the Lane that I’ll remember other than how many people talk on the phone.
And, Jesus Christ, do they talk on the phone.
The setup should have some juice to it. Patrick Bergin plays Dr. Peter Thomas, a retired psychiatrist trying to write his memoir when a former patient contacts him. News of a recent suicide begins pulling Thomas back toward his former professional life and eventually into what the film describes as a world of dark sexual desire and obsession. Figgis has said the idea grew from wondering about the psychological toll patients' problems might take on the psychiatrists treating them.
That's not a bad premise.
In fact, I can see the movie hiding inside it.
The problem is that The House at the End of the Lane spends an astonishing amount of its opening stretch having people explain that movie to one another over the telephone.
At first I assumed this was simply exposition the film needed to get out of the way. Fine. A phone rings. Somebody tells somebody something. We've all seen movies.
Then there's another call.
And another.
Around 18 minutes into the movie, I realized I had spent what felt like most of the film watching telephone conversations.
Then the guy they're talking about is on the phone.
At some point you have to admire the commitment.
The temptation here is to start making jokes about renaming the film Phone Calls, and believe me, I considered it. But the repetition points toward the movie's larger problem: this is remarkably uncinematic storytelling.
Information is constantly being communicated, but very little feels like it's actually happening.
That's a deadly distinction.
A thriller needs to create the sensation that the protagonist is being pulled somewhere he shouldn't go. The official material describes Thomas as moving from professional detachment into personal obsession, which should give the film a gradual descent into something increasingly dangerous. Instead, especially early on, the movie often feels like we're waiting for the story we're hearing about to finally become the story we're watching.
And the scenes don't know when to end.
That may have bothered me even more than the phone gimmick itself. Conversations make their point, then continue. Characters establish information, then keep talking around that information. Scenes that already feel dramatically static are allowed to sit there until whatever little tension they possessed has drained out of them.
There's a version of slow cinema where duration becomes tension.
This isn't that.
This is just long.
The frustrating part is that I can see an attempt to avoid the clumsiest kind of exposition. Characters aren't always turning directly toward the camera and announcing the plot. But if you disguise exposition inside an eight-minute telephone conversation and then eventually state the important information bluntly anyway, you haven't really solved the problem.
You've just made the exposition longer.
The cinematography doesn't help.
There is a genuinely cool house and property here. The movie has access to the kind of location that ought to be doing half the filmmaker's work for him. A secluded house at the end of a lane comes preloaded with atmosphere. Frame it properly, control what we can and can't see, use the geography, make me wonder what's beyond the next room or outside the window.
Instead, much of the visual storytelling feels uninspired.
That's especially painful because this is supposedly a psychological thriller. Figgis and cinematographer Adrian Nathan Lopez are credited with shooting the film, while Figgis also handled the editing. When a movie depends this heavily on conversations, the images have to find some other way to generate tension.
They rarely do.
Then, just when I thought we might escape the phones for a while, a character starts listening to music.
On her phone.
I laughed.
I don't think I was supposed to.
And then there was another call.
Fine. I surrender.
The phone is apparently the movie.
That joke aside, there's an important distinction here. Movies can absolutely build themselves around telephone conversations. The Guilty does it. Locke essentially builds an entire feature out of one man driving and making calls. Great thrillers have generated unbearable tension with nothing more than a ringing telephone.
The problem isn't the device.
The problem is what you do with it.
Here, the phone mostly becomes a conduit for dialogue that I found painfully dull.
BayView's publicity positions The House at the End of the Lane as a return to the erotic thrillers of the 1990s, specifically invoking the era of Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction and the late-night cable thrillers that followed them. That's actually an appealing idea. That particular genre has become strangely scarce, and there is absolutely room for a grubby little indie version of it.
But those movies understood something fundamental about lurid material: you have to actually give the audience something to watch.
Sexual danger. Suspicion. Voyeurism. Manipulation. Obsession. A sense that everyone in the movie is making decisions they absolutely should not be making.
Talking about those things isn't enough.
Patrick Bergin's presence only makes that missed opportunity stranger. This is an actor associated with Sleeping with the Enemy, a movie that knew exactly how to exploit menace, obsession and psychological control. BayView clearly knows the association, because Bergin's history with that era is central to how they're marketing this film.
But nostalgia for a genre isn't the same as understanding its machinery.
There has to be momentum.
There has to be tension.
There has to be a reason I don't want to look away.
Instead, I kept wanting to turn the movie off.
I don't write that casually.
I'm an independent filmmaker myself. I know how difficult it is to finish a feature. Money is short. Time is shorter. You rarely have all the locations, equipment, coverage or shooting days you want. I'm generally willing to meet a low-budget film halfway when I can see the filmmakers wrestling against those limitations.
But budget isn't really my problem with The House at the End of the Lane.
A better camera wouldn't fix these scenes.
More money wouldn't automatically fix them either.
The fundamental problems are writing, pacing and visual storytelling. Scenes need objectives. Dialogue needs compression. Information needs to arrive through conflict rather than simply being discussed. A thriller has to continually create questions in my mind that I actually want answered.
Too often, this movie creates only one:
When is this scene going to end?
That's brutal, but it's where I landed.
The house itself has atmosphere. The central idea, a psychiatrist becoming consumed by the darkness he's spent his career observing from a professional distance, has potential. The deliberate attempt to resurrect the sleazy psychological thrillers of the '90s is something I'd normally be completely willing to get behind.
But potential isn't the movie.
The movie is the movie.
And watching The House at the End of the Lane became genuinely painful for me.
I joked while watching that it should simply have been called Phone Calls.
By the end, I'm not entirely convinced that's a joke.
This is one of the worst films I've reviewed for Critical Screening so far.
2.7/10
Critical Screening was provided a screener of The House at the End of the Lane for review purposes.