All definitions in this essay are collaged from the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (4th ed.) and the New Oxford American Dictionary (3rd ed.)
gen ∙ re | ˈZHänrə |
a category of artistic composition
characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter
from the Renaissance and until well on into the 18th c.
the genres were carefully distinguished
writers were expected to follow the rules prescribed for them
Don’t get me wrong—it makes sense to look for a narrative in life. To pull a single thread of meaning from the snarl, to shape a story from the tangle. Moments that might otherwise seem random or disconnected can gain meaning through the mere act of juxtaposition.
But the agonizing thing about trying to create a story from the events of a life is that it can all change in an instant. Life is infuriatingly genre-shifting. You can cycle through every category in the span of a single day. And the stuff outside of your control might start to make you feel like someone else is writing these things for you. Like your story might not be yours.
You might think you’re in a love story, and then one event changes the entire trajectory. You lose someone; a relationship ends; you find yourself alone. Suddenly it’s not a romance anymore—but what is it instead? Who the hell is plotting this, you might think as you drive miserably to work and every goddamn light is red. Who made this narrative decision? Why wasn’t I consulted?
Heartbreak upends your understanding of yourself and your environment. In its wake, little feels stable or certain. Reality has shifted irrevocably, and there you are in the middle of the story, just trying to find your bearings again.
What did I have? What did I lose? And what is left?
What kind of story am I in?
ro ∙ mance | rōˈmans, ˈrōˌmans |
a genre of fiction dealing with love in an idealized way
In The Night House (2020), Beth (Rebecca Hall) has spent fourteen years believing her life told a certain kind of love story. As viewers, we meet wife and husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) through a still life of the world they built together. Framed photos adorn the walls and shelves, images that tell a familiar story: two people meet and fall in love. Here is where those two people worked, and slept, and lived. These rooms, these pictures, all of the ephemera of daily life—this was the home they shared.
And then, just as quickly, we discover this narrative has changed—and pictures rarely tell the full story. The front door opens and we meet Beth in the immediate aftermath of the worst event of her life: her husband’s suicide.
There’s a reason that romances often stop short of exploring the lived reality of ‘happily ever after.’ Better to end with a beginning, the suggestion of future (forever) happiness. If you don’t have to flesh out the details of what comes next, you can imagine the best-case scenario. A story that never ends. Eternal, perfect partnership. Love in an idealized way.
There’s a story that society generally expects from a person who’s lost their loved one—particularly a woman. There’s the trope of the widow in black, perhaps veiled to diminish the full brunt of her pain from observers, the provision of privacy. A single story, recurring images. An absence, a sadness. A spotlit solitude. And Beth knows this story. When she first comes through the door in that opening scene, we see her engaged in conversation with a well-meaning companion. Beth says the things she’s supposed to say, doesn’t push back, accepts what’s offered to her. And so we get a glimpse of that story, if only for a moment.
But the lived experience is so much messier than that. Just as often as it muffles or smothers, grief unhinges. It detonates. And so, in this case, Beth’s husband is dead and she’s fucking angry about it. Angry that the story is different than she thought it was.
And this quickly becomes what I like about Beth—she refuses to remain within any box of expectation. She bucks her own story at every turn. Brash and surprising, not meek or delicate, but angry and abrasive. Her movements are sudden and violent—dumping a gifted casserole in the trash, throwing items haphazardly into boxes, opening doors a little bit too hard. She shows up at work when everyone expects her to be at home, flaunts the truth when expected to mask and euphemize.
And what a fucking relief.
Beth’s anger as she reevaluates her story and rejects the mold of the mourning widow is refreshing, even invigorating. We see a different possibility for her story, where grief is not glass or lace. Grief is a boulder through a window. A crowbar lodged forever in a door. The aftershock that hits just as you begin to resettle the shelves.
And so, even in the midst of great loss, there’s something exhilarating about scorning expectation, isn’t there? Knowing the story everyone expects from you and doing something else instead.
Fuck your story. I’ll find a new one.
mys ∙ ter ∙ y | ˈmist(ə)rē |
a novel, play, or movie dealing with something
that is difficult or impossible to understand
Any death is genre-shifting. Suddenly every new day becomes another excruciating page in a grief memoir you didn’t want to write. But a death like Owen’s is also a detective story. Suicide recasts loss as a mystery. Asking why might set you on a path of investigation, too.
What facts are you starting with? What do you know for sure?
“I’m the one who struggled with that stuff. Depression. Dark thoughts,” Beth recounts on an outing with coworkers. “He’s the one who kept them at bay.” There it is again, the story that she thought she lived—she was the one troubled by darkness, not him. Not her Owen.
But she begins to uncover things that complicate the narrative she once understood to be true. Some of the clues suggest infidelity, others crime—but all together they begin to unravel the idea that she had about him, their love, their story. Each discovery brings her closer to a new truth as it becomes clear that whatever led Owen to make the choice he made involves secrets. Things he hid from her. “I didn’t think we had secrets,” Beth admits. Who was she married to?
The spiral of revelation prolongs the intensity of the initial loss. Beth cannot properly grieve the end of the relationship she had, because she is in constant motion trying to determine what it was instead. Settling on a narrative allows you to process grief, but what if you can’t even find a new story that makes sense, that makes all the pieces fit together? With each new secret uncovered, she’s back at emotional square one.
In the wake of Owen’s death, Beth has entered a world of mirrors, lookalikes, and discoveries she can’t quite understand. She uncovers a reversed floorplan of the home they shared together, a secret house that Owen built on the other side of the lake—almost like their own, but backward. Wrong. It reflects the caliber of the loss, the way everything around you looks just a little bit different than you remember. How nothing quite feels the same.
“Everybody has secrets,” a friend assures her. It’s a truth that’s comforting or ominous. The revelation of Owen’s secret leaves Beth torn between realities; in order to move forward, she must settle on a single narrative.
But what is one to do if the story keeps changing?
hor ∙ ror | ˈhôrər |
a literary or film genre concerned with arousing feelings of fear
the horror story explores the limits
of what people are capable of doing and experiencing
Horror is a way of probing life’s worst possibilities through the ostensible safety of fiction. In these stories, villains arise. Sometimes these villains are entirely human. In others, evil takes a supernatural form—something that exists outside of the reality that we understand to be true. Both can be horror.
As I see it, the revelations around Owen’s character appear to present Beth with two possibilities.
One: Owen was a serial killer who murdered women with the intent of satisfying his own monstrous urges. He invents a supernatural story to excuse decidedly human actions. In this explanation, the strange events that Beth experiences in the wake of his death are a product of her own inability to come to terms with her husband’s true nature. In the thick of her heartbreak, she is ill-equipped to deal with the gravity of these revelations, and she turns to the possibility of another explanation for the horrors committed by the man she loved so much.
So, two: Owen was sacrificing these women’s lives in an effort to keep the otherworldly force pursuing Beth at bay. A near-death experience years prior opened a door for Beth that allows her to see what no one else can—that death and life are not as walled off as the rest of us would like to believe. Something is pursuing her, it believes that Beth escaped unfairly, and it wants her back. Owen could only hold this entity off through secrets and sacrifice for so long, doing things he never could have imagined because he wanted so desperately to protect her, and now he’s gone.
Either way, women are dead.
Either way, their bodies are buried under the secret house.
Either way, the person she thought she knew is merely a facet of who Owen really was.
“Just remember your Owen,” a friend says in an attempt at comfort. “Who you fell in love with. Because whatever else he was, he was that, too.”
But either way, the story’s changed again.
thrill ∙ er | ˈTHrilər |
a novel, play, or movie with an exciting plot
in which action is swift and suspense continual
Sometimes suspense builds because you have no idea what’s coming. The idea that anything could happen is equal parts frightening and exhilarating. Other times you know exactly what to expect, but you don’t know when it’ll hit. It’s the timing that surprises, that unnerves.
If Beth could just settle into a final version of the story—one she can accept as her reality—her mind might let her rest. The very night she intends to leave the house Owen built for her ends up being her most painful yet. Sometimes it’s when you’re closest to healing that the darkness fights hardest to win you back.
The end of the film is marked by a final confrontation in a boat—the same one that Owen died in. In that moment, Beth either speaks to the supernatural entity wearing Owen’s likeness as a disguise, or to the ‘true’ Owen as Beth now imagines him—the side of himself he’d always hidden from her. The old one gone forever.
“There is only me,” says Owen, or the thing masquerading as Owen. “Come back to me.”
She loved her husband, but who was he? What was his true role in the horrors she’s uncovered? How will she choose to remember him?
Two round moons hang overhead in the sky on that final night—gorgeous, terrifying, impossible—signifying the choice that Beth must make. We don’t know which story she’ll pick, whether or not she’ll survive. All we know is that this can’t continue. Every second seems like it could be the last, every word the final.
The question is no longer just what kind of story am I in, but how will this story end?
au ∙ to ∙ bi ∙ og ∙ ra ∙ phy | ˌôdəˌbīˈäɡrəfē, ˌädəˌbīˈäɡrəfē |
an account of a person’s life written by that person
truth may be distorted for the sake of convenience or harmony
and the occlusions of time may obscure as much as they reveal
Genre sets expectations for the future. It gives us likelihoods and landmarks. Sets the ball rolling. Creates possibilities. But the interpretation of the story that results—in film, in life—will always be unique to you.
The history of Beth’s love for Owen colors the way she sees the facts, the future. Because she brings her history, her story, to the way she sees the world, her interpretation of her husband’s actions might differ from your own.
I have watched the film through both lenses since my first viewing. Is this the part where I tip my hand? Tell you how my own story has tilted me toward one perspective or the other? Or alternatively, perhaps I step back, assume a voice of authority, divest myself of any personal relationship to the art and tell you the ‘correct’ reading. What to believe.
But when talking about art, the idea of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ interpretations of a story have always been less interesting to me than how the story makes you feel.
The Night House does not conclude with a simple explanation, or a traditional happy ending, but simply this: a path forward. An end to the limbo. A continuation. Whatever Beth understands about what she went through, she has survived it. What comes next belongs to her.
When considering genre, I’m reminded that our stories are far from static. And if life is always shifting, change is always possible—in the good times, yes, but also in the bad. And there’s hope in that, right? Change can be devastating, but change is also the only way to heal. Your story’s not over yet. If nothing else, remember: every night holds within it the inevitability of day.