The Beach House-- My take on the movie with spoilers!
PLOT SUMMARY: Emily and Randall find themselves in danger from their neighbors and the environment when they head to a Beach House.
Whenever I go to the beach, the first thing that comes to my mind while heading toward it, is who lives in the houses by the beach? Do they like living right next to the beach? Imagine waking up in the middle of the night to waves crashing on the shore. Would it sound soothing or scary?
And what happens when the tide comes in? Or if there is a catastrophic tsunami? Beach houses would be the first to go, wouldn’t they?
While most of these thoughts were formed because I began watching horror movies too soon and my mind immediately conjured up Final Destination scenarios, here is another reason why you might want to reconsider buying a beach house: There could be a weird explosion in the depths of the sea that mutates everything around the area.
THE BEACH HOUSE Movie Plot
Emily and Randall take a long drive to the Beach House, Randall’s father owns. They don’t inform anyone, even Randall’s father doesn’t know.
The first thing they do when they reach is head straight for the bedroom, and then when they wake up, looking oddly unsatisfied with each other, Randall suggests that because he’s a dropout, Emily should also consider abandoning her studies.
Emily is a nerd and wants to keep studying complex sciences that she won’t use to explain what is happening around her. Her pursuing astrobiology does nothing to further or explain the strange happenings.
When Emily ventures downstairs rather than tell Randall she likes the fact she is in school and he should get serious too, she finds dirty plates and a stocked fridge.
Someone is clearly living here but not too keen on cleanliness. There are also dozens of bottles in the medicine cabinet.
Emily sees a woman enter and creeps upstairs to tell Randall that they need to leave.
He heads down and sees a woman kind of hiding from them.
She recognizes Randall as Randy and introduces herself as Jane. A man comes along and recognizes Randy too. That is what they remember him as.
Emily wants to leave, but Jane mentions being happy to have some company. Randall doesn’t want to go to a hotel and spend so much money when he can use his father’s beach house for free.
The four sit down for dinner and Jane and her husband Mitch remember the time Randall had eaten so many oysters that he threw up. Randall decides to eat one for old times sake and regrets it.
Emily doesn’t even try.
Jane asks Randall what he’s doing since Emily keeps bragging about her education at every opportunity she gets. Randall thinks going to college is a waste of time and wants to take it easy. Jane tells him he’s lucky to have enough time to figure things out.
Randall wants them all to eat some chocolate that has drugs in them. The four readily eat and start seeing vibrating colors. They also see some weird particles that Emily says belongs to the bottom of the sea. Jane wants to go and see the pretty glowing things.
She does exactly that and wanders off alone to a place where everything is blue and glowing. She touches something that she thinks is snow except it is not. She gets scared and returns.
Everyone tries searching for Jane but since they took drugs they are completely out of it. Emily wakes up in the middle of the night and goes to a room to hear Jane vomiting. Mitch closes the door on her face.
Emily and Randall fall asleep in their clothes, too tired to change. They wake up to find Mitch missing and Jane in bad shape. Her skin has lesions and she seems in a trancelike state.
They search for Mitch all over the house, then get exhausted and bored and decide to lie down in the beach and soak up some sun rays. Emily and Randall both remove their jackets and relax.
They barely know Jane and Mitch so why should they bother as much?
But Randall ate the oysters and now has food poisoning. He rushes to the house while Emily wants to continue to relax.
Last night, Mitch was talking about the water feeling soft, but since he was high, no one took him seriously. Randall finishes using the toilet and when he opens the tap to wash his hands, finds slime oozing out. He decides to forgo washing his hands and unfortunately doesn’t have hand sanitizer. He roams around with his unwashed hands and finds Jane croaking.
Meanwhile, Emily wakes up to find Mitch beside her wondering where everyone is. Then, bored of Emily’s company and tired of taking care of his sick wife, he walks into the sea to drown himself.
Emily runs after him, but there is some reluctance. Does she really want to swim after a guy she just met a day before? Still, she heads near the water and immediately steps into some slimy goo. She gets stung and now has to crawl all the way up to the beach house while cursing her boyfriend for not being around. She probably thinks he wants revenge for her not being there when he has diarrhoea.
She goes into the kitchen and finds the perfect equipment to operate on her foot. She uses the knife to pry the wormy thing out and uses the tings to really pull it out of her foot. She pours white vinegar over her wounds and bandages her foot.
THE BEACH HOUSE Ending Explained with Spoilers!
She crawls all over the house and finds Randall fending off Jane whose eyes have turned white and is crawling after them. They escape but Randall left his keys in his shoes that are now at the beach.
The couple drags themselves away from the Beach house and goes to a nearby one where the neighbour too has transformed into a zombie-like creature.
Night comes, and weird fog envelopes everything. Randall complains about it smelling like rotten eggs. Sulfur?
They find a police car and Emily uses the radio to ask for help. The man on the other end wants to know if they might be contaminated as well and then doesn’t respond.
Emily and Randall enter an empty house and turn on the TV to find an emergency broadcast on every channel. Emily wanders about the house to look at things while Randall transforms into a creature with white eyes.
Emily goes to the basement and finds two people who have turned into slimy creatures. They aren’t doing much except looking gross and don’t follow her or anything. Emily steals their oxygen tanks because clearly, those slimy creatures can probably breathe underwater now because of their transformation.
She goes to Randall who grabs her leg. She thinks he’s turning evil and bashes him with the oxygen tank. All those who had transformed are pretty much just crawling and have white eyes. Perhaps they aren’t as violent as Emily thinks they are.
She runs away with the tank and steals the car. But the stinking fog has rolled in and she can’t see. She suffocated and crashes the car.
In the end, she is lying on the beach, urging herself to not be scared.
The water washes over her and she disappears. Did she not even get a chance to transform into a slimy creature? She turned into bacteria? The beach?
Did the bacteria hear her talking about her education and decide to bring her into the depths of their world and make her their queen?
Unfortunately, there is no explanation as to what caused the explosion underneath and why everyone was infected and what actually happens to Emily.
Scare scale: 2/5
It was explained what happened, the earth heating up caused microbes to be released from the bottom of the ocean.
ReplyDeleteEmily's education was actually setting the premise of the film. She talked about organisms adapting to uninhabitable environments. When Jane asked her what earth was like in the beginning, Emily replied that it would be swirling gasses, boiling, chaos.
Randall was infected by eating the oyster, which obviously came from the ocean.
At the end, Emily disintegrated when the ocean made contact with her, just as jellyfish disintegrate when they are washed up on the shore and make contact with the air. I guess it was their way of showing different stages to infection based on how each person was initially infected.