House of Darkness (2022) (Blu-ray Review)
DIRECTED BY: Neil LaBute
STARRING: Gia Crovatin, Justin Long, Kate Bosworth
RATED: R/Region: O/1:85/1080P/NUMBER OF DISCS 1 (BDr)
AVAILABLE FROM Shoreline Entertainment
House of Darkness (2022) is what happens when you lock Justin Long in a car with Neil LaBute’s screenplay and decide that the real horror is listening to a guy talk himself into a hole for 85 minutes. It bills itself as a “sexy horror thriller,” but it mostly plays like a TED Talk titled Why Women Don’t Text You Back, with occasional pauses for ominous lighting.
Justin Long does exactly what he’s good at: playing a smug, chatty creep who thinks he’s charming while the movie very patiently proves he is not. To be fair, this is intentional—LaBute has never met a male ego he didn’t want to dissect with surgical cruelty. Unfortunately, the dissection here feels less like a sharp scalpel and more like someone repeatedly poking the same bruise and calling it insight.
The film’s minimalism is clearly deliberate: two characters, lots of dialogue, almost no movement. That’s fine in theory, but in practice it feels like a stage play that forgot to bring the tension, the pacing, or the fun. The “twist” arrives, nods politely, and then hangs around far too long, like a party guest who thinks revealing one interesting fact entitles them to another half hour of monologuing.
There are things to like. The atmosphere is moody, the night photography is solid, and Long commits fully to being the kind of guy you’d fake a phone call to avoid. And when the film finally leans into its horror elements, you can briefly see the better, sharper movie it might have been.
But House of Darkness ultimately feels less like a horror film and more like a lecture delivered in candlelight. It wants to skewer toxic masculinity, but it does so with such smug self-satisfaction that you start wishing the movie would take its own advice and listen less to itself. By the end, the real scare isn’t what’s lurking in the dark—it’s the realization that this movie thinks it said something profound and is very proud of itself for doing so.
