House at the End of the Street – Film Review

In search of a fresh start, divorcee Sarah (Elisabeth Shue) and her daughter, Elissa (Jennifer Lawrence), find their dream house in a small town. But when startling, unexplainable events begin, the pair learn that a chilling secret holds the town in its grip. Years earlier a girl killed her parents and disappeared, leaving a brother, Ryan (Max Thieriot), as the sole survivor. Elissa begins a relationship with Ryan, and the closer they get, the deeper they’re all pulled into a dangerous mystery.

While scrolling through Netflix, it can be incredibly hard to finally pick a movie and put it on because of just how many options are on there. Sadly, though, the horror selection (at least here in Canada) is not that great. It’s chalked full with terrible horror films that are poorly written, badly directed, and extremely predictable. Mark Tonderai‘s House at the End of the Street is not only all of those things I just mentioned, but it’s barely even a horror movie. In fact, a lot of the time, I felt as though I was watching some angsty teen coming-of-age drama with some sprinkles of trippy hallucinations added in.

Watching this film was a chore, to say the least, and that’s not a feeling you want whenever you watch a film. You want to be whisked away to another world. You want to be deeply invested in the main characters and you want more than anything to be totally immersed in the film to the point where all your real-world troubles are forgotten for the entire running time. House at the End of the Street is so boring that it’s not possible to get sucked into the story.

One of the reasons why is because the film rarely feels like it even has a story. For the vast majority of the film, we follow young Elissa as he traverses through her high-school life and, as with any high-schooler, makes a handful of friends and, of course, starts to swoon over a new, mysterious guy she quickly bonds with. And, of course, the mysterious guy turns out to be quite suspicious as predicted.

Not only is the film hilariously predictable in every way, but it’s not even scary in the slightest. It would be at least something if it was maybe a bit creepy and had some solid atmosphere, but it doesn’t even have that going for it. As I said earlier, this movie feels like a coming-of-age movie rather than a horror. It’s almost like the screenwriter initially penned this script and planned it out to be a coming-of-age drama but realized it was so boring so he decided “Eh, what the heck? I might as well throw in some horror elements in here as well”.

Even though it runs at a short one-hundred-and-one minutes, it’s all spent building up to payoffs that literally never happen. I can’t see how anybody could watch this movie and call it scary or riveting because to be quite honest with you, almost nothing happens in the film at all. Jennifer Lawrence is an insanely talented actress and has proven herself time and time again to be an amazing talent but sadly, she was just involved with the wrong project here.

And truth be told, I have no idea why she even accepted this project in the first place because it doesn’t even really do much with her character Elissa. By the time the credits rolled, I really didn’t feel as if I got a sense of who Elissa was. She’s a high-school girl who swoons over a guy, has trouble with her mother not being there for her, and that’s pretty much it. It’s genuinely sad to see how little care went into developing the characters here.

Whenever I watch a film, I always try to find something I enjoyed, but with House at the End of the Street, I sadly have to say that there was nothing I liked about it. It’s a misfire on all fronts and shouldn’t be allowed to be classified as a horror film. Even as a coming-of-age film, it doesn’t work. It suffers from terrible writing, poor direction, and a story that quite honestly goes nowhere.