I saw this movie in the "Coming This Week" section in Netflix and was quite interested with the premise and the stars. So I did not hesitate to watch it on its first day of release yesterday. And so how was the movie? Let's find out more shall we?

Brief Story Line

A family that consisted of Amanda (Julia Roberts - Ticket to Paradise, Money Monster etc), her husband Clay (Ethan Hawke - The Black Phone, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets etc), their teenaged children Archie (Charlie Evans) and his younger sister Rose (Farrah Mackenzie - Logan Lucky etc) left New York city to go on a short vacation to the Long Island. They rented an expensive house and were enjoying their time there.

However on their first night, an unknown couple named G.H. Scott (Mahershala Ali - Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse, Green Book etc) and his daughter Ruth (Myha'la - Bodies Bodies Bodies, Industry TV series etc) suddenly came to their door step and asked to stay for the night due to blackout. After some time, Clay decided to let them stay despite the strong objection by Amanda.

The following morning, they started to suspect that there was something more than just a blackout. So what actually occurred and what would happen to these people? You could find out in this movie.

End o Brief Story Line

As I watched this movie with the early part showing a title of "Part I The House", I immediately thought it looked like something adapted from a novel. And turned out it was true as I noticed in the closing credits that the movie was indeed adapted from 2020 novel of the same title written by Rumaan Alam. After further reading, I found out that it was a best seller and highly praised novel where there was a bidding war to acquire the rights for film adaptation, obviously won by Netflix.

Anyway, as I continued watching I could not help but feeling a strong sense of something from M. Night Shyamalan's work so I was really intrigued with the conclusion. As the movie progressed at a steady pace with a bit of interesting and surprising piece of information every now and then, it made me grew curious. With the nice performance of Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali, it also make the movie more interesting. The rest were quite OK too with another character played by Kevin Bacon (Patriots Day, Footloose etc) who added a bit of dynamic in the mix.

For a film that has duration of 141 minutes, it might feel long for audience who expected something brief, especially with a simple premise. Yes despite the scary feeling if something like this ever happened, it was actually not a complicated story. Surprisingly for me I did not feel bored with it. Perhaps it was due to the smart story telling by the director Sam Esmail (creator of Mr. Robot TV series and Homecoming TV series with Julia Roberts as the lead character) and the fact that I already knew it would be a psychological thriller which tend to be a slow burn. Although to be fair, I think Part III might be the slowest than the rest, while my favorite was Part IV.

As I said above, I watched this film with great anticipation towards the end. So when I finally reached it, I was kind of bummed it had such an ending since I was expecting it differently. But from objective point of view, it was actually a good ending and made me understood why critics were appreciative of the novel. Despite categorized as thriller, but the thrilling part was not of the good vs bad guys, instead more towards the situation the people were in. So if you are into the kind of movie about post-apocalyptic situation, with strong enough performances from the cast and a good story telling, then you would likely enjoy this. 

Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars