SPOILER ALERT: the following article contains massive spoilers, including the ending. If you have not yet seen the movie, proceed at your own risk, or better, come back to this article later!
Reeling from the unexpected death of her husband, Beth is left alone in the lakeside home he built for her. Soon she begins to uncover her recently deceased husband’s disturbing secrets.
SPOILERS AHEAD
The Night House Plot Summary and Synopsis
Beth has just lost her husband Owen to suicide. He took a boat out from the lakehouse they live in and shot himself with a gun that Beth didn’t know he owned.
Beth is devastated by his death and spends her nights drinking and going through Owen’s belongings. She insists on continuing her regular job as a teacher and tries to seem stable and in control much to the concern of her friend Claire and neighbor Mel.
An ominous suicide note left by Owen where he claimed that “There is nothing. Nothing is after you. You’re safe now” continues to perplex Beth. Beth begins to suffer from strange supernatural events at night that she initially dismisses as dreams but slowly realizes they are real.
While going through Owen’s belongings, Beth finds floor plans for a reverse of their lake house.
Beth also discovers a photo on Owen’s phone of a woman who looks very similar to her. She suspects Owen was having an affair and is asked by Claire to stop digging into Owen’s past.
After a night out with Claire and their coworkers, a drunken Beth reveals that she died for four minutes in a car accident years ago and saw that there was nothing when she died. Owen always disagreed with this and was close to changing her mind before he died. Beth also states that she suffered from depression and that Owen began sleepwalking a year ago, expressing concern that she somehow passed her negative emotions to him.
That night, Claire is awoken by a supernatural presence and witnesses several frightened women fleeing through the woods. Investigating, she finds blood on the boat where Owen shot himself and feels an invisible presence.
Traversing across the lake to investigate a strange set of lights, Beth discovers a reversed, identical copy of her and Owen’s house and sees ghostly figures of women with Owen. She passes out and reawakens in her own house the next morning before she can investigate.
She heads to the house again and encounters Mel who expresses concern for Beth’s mental wellbeing. She finds the house although this time it is not finished and is empty. Beth retrieves a strange statue from the house and confronts Mel who claims he never saw a house but admits he once saw Owen in the woods at night with a woman who looked similar to Beth.
Beth continues her investigation, finding more photos of women who look similar to her on Owen’s laptop and identifies the statue from one of Owen’s books as an occult voodoo doll. It appears that Owen was researching about tricking and trapping demonic entities.
Beth travels to the bookstore where Owen bought the occult books and encounters one of the women from Owen’s photos called Madelyne. An enraged Beth tells her what happened to Owen but Madelyne denies sleeping with Owen. Back at the house, Beth is haunted by a silhouette of Owen.
Beth visits Claire who asks Beth to spend a few days away from the house. Beth agrees and heads home to pack. She threatens the ghost in the house, demanding to know the truth. Madelyne arrives at the house. She tells Beth how she was invited over by Owen and visited the reverse house.
While kissing Owen, he attempted to choke her but soon apologized once she panicked and fled. Once Madelyne leaves, Beth visits the reverse house and discovers multiple bodies under the floorboards of the women that Owen had photograhed. A horrified Beth tries to call Claire but can’t get through to her.
The invisible force harasses Beth again and Beth hugs it, mistaking it for Owen’s spirit. The spirit reveals that it isn’t Owen and shows her visions of Owen killing the various women.
Beth tries to flee the house and sees more of Owen attacking and murdering the women. She is attacked and dragged through the house by the entity.
It reveals that it was actually what Beth saw when she died, it is “Nothing”. Nothing explains that it tried convincing Owen to kill Beth in order to bring Beth back to it but he resisted.
He built the reverse house and murdered the lookalikes of Beth to try and trick Nothing but Nothing eventually realized the trick and resisted. It traps Beth in a position like the statue she had retrieved from the house.
In the morning, Claire arrives at the house and sees evidence of a fight in the house. Discovering that the gun Owen used to kill himself is gone, Claire rushes out to the dock with Mel where they find Beth floating out in the boat with the gun.
In Nothing’s dimension, the demon tries to convince Beth to join it and kill herself but Claire’s yells snap Beth out of her trance.
Claire retrieves Beth from the boat and makes it back to the dock.
The Night House Ending
Beth sees the outline of the demon floating in the boat and when Mel asks what she’s looking at, she replies that “it’s nothing” suggesting Beth has finally overcome her grief.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0).