The Beach House (2020)

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

The Beach House starts off with a premise involving a young couple who decided to spend a romantic getaway in an unused beach house owned by the boy's parents. However, their plans soon takes them to a completely different direction as there seem to be something sinister and infectious coming from the sea. 

The plot is simple and the cast is kept small with only 4 main characters. However, The Beach House has enough going for it to keep my attention in its concise and tight running time of one and a half hours. As a thriller that falls under the horror genre, it is refreshing to find this film devoid of the use of jump scares or cheesy dialogue that we find so often in other lesser films. There is also no nudity and not much of a gore factor so for those who enjoy their scares raw and more basic, this will definitely not be for you. Instead we have some good believable performances from fresh faces, and a script that doesn't treat the audience like sexed staved adolescents. This helps keep the viewing interesting and I for one was fixated to find out what happens next. I also appreciate that despite the film's obviously small budget, it doesn't look cheap thanks to some impressive camerawork. However, some of the zombies like make up effects looked a bit cheesy but thankfully these were not excessive so did not really distract that much. 

While the film's ending may not be overly satisfactory in that there was no clear explanation of the infection that seem to have engulfed the coast, and in some way, a bit of a cliché for this genre. However, I thought the mood and atmosphere in many of the sequences were effective in creating the impending sense of doom and helplessness of the victims. It conjures memory from admittedly more established horror movies like The Mist, The Fog, zombie movies and more recently The Colour of Space. Okay okay that's not very original but at least it is done decently here to make for an impactful scare trip. All in all The Beach House is a decent entry in the horror genre and delivers the thrills.