New mum Harper (Katie Parker) and her baby daughter move in with her mother Sadie (Patricia Heaton) to help finish sorting out an old fixer-upper of a home, bought with intent to flip. Also along for the ride is Bette (Emma Fitzpatrick), a live-in carer who turns out to be pregnant. But the path of property renovation never did run smooth, and soon, the weird noises and shadows and visions of a strange figure with a beak-like face start to take their toll on Harper. But how real is the threat? Is it all simply the projections of a frayed psyche or is something supernatural going on?
Initially, it seems that writer and director Angela Gulner’s debut (previously titled The Beldham) is akin to a low-budget version of The Babadook, the breakout hit from 2014 that saw Essie Davis’s young widow living perpetually on the verge of a breakdown. There is indeed a similar interplay here as to whether what is tormenting Harper is an external menace or has to do with her own mental state – but the situation is revealed to be a much sadder one than is initially apparent.
This is a film that sits in a subgenre that you might term tragi-horror, a properly emotional tear-jerker that sits within the broader horror genre – though even the big grief-horror classics like Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now are normally stronger on the chiller aspect than on making the audience weep. The House at Hallow End reverses this proposition, with some familiar horror imagery preceding a strong closing plot twist that gives a barnstorming emotional heft to everything that precedes it. It is a powerful and moving addition to the canon of horror films about the parent-child bond.
