“My husband shot himself in the head last Thursday,” explains high-school teacher Beth (Rebecca Hall). It’s why she’s on edge, unable to sleep through the night in the lake house he built for her in upstate New York. The home’s endless glass doors and windows foreshadow the creepy reflections, mirror images and doppelgangers to come in David Bruckner’s stylish and genuinely sinister horror movie.
Beth begins to investigate the glittering black lake and misty woods that surround the house, encountering her late husband’s buried secrets (and a satisfying number of jump scares). The film is admittedly better at building tension than it is at resolving it; the third act has a supernatural twist that doesn’t fully hang together. The fuzzy plotting is balanced by Hall’s brilliantly controlled performance as the caustic, sceptical Beth, whose grief has pushed her to the knife edge of sanity.
