Rebecca Hall's haunting performance highlights a twisty tale of ghostly encounters in 'The Night House'

“The Night House” — ★ ★ ★

David Bruckner's “The Night House” arms itself with an arsenal of strange, nerve-jangling sounds, but none so creepy as the sound of viewers' jaws hitting the theater floor while layers of this supernatural mystery peel back to reveal increasingly disturbing surprises.

Like the impressionable nanny in Henry James' wordy novella “The Turn of the Screw” (the basis for the 1961 movie “The Innocents”), Rebecca Hall's susceptible schoolteacher Beth could be the victim of a fervid imagination. Or could ghosts be real?

“The Night House” plunges us into a world of frightening, unhinged realities so well-wrought that we experience the same immersive sense of reeling disorientation as Beth does.

Beth has just buried her husband of 14 years, Owen (Evan Jonigkeit).

As screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski teasingly parcel out the exposition, we find out Owen committed suicide with a handgun in a boat on the lake in back of their house.

And we don't need to wait for nearly a half-hour for weird things to happen, as in some films.

A succession of ultra-loud knocks almost leads the movie and builds from there, along with a stereo system that turns on by itself and bloody footprints on the dock coming toward the house.

Beth has terribly imaginative dreams of another house just like hers, but everything is reversed (duplicity at work?) and she sees scenes of her husband with women who strongly resemble her.

What does all this mean, and what the heck is with that small figurine of a naked woman with javelin-like spikes running through her body?

“The Night House” may not be a horror masterpiece, but it is a masterpiece of manipulation, one in which we may not always understand what's going on, but we become hooked on getting answers to the increasingly bizarre discoveries Beth makes about her hubby's extracurricular activities.

(Hey, maybe it all has something to do with the four minutes that Beth officially “died” several years ago. Ya think?)

Bruckner — who directed a segment of the horror cheapie “V/H/S” and who will give us the “Hellraiser” reboot in 2022 — has crafted an absorbing, atmospheric thriller, but his executive producer/star Hall proves to be his greatest asset. Her arc from distraught widow to survivalist detective grounds the film's more confusing parts in a stark, emotional reality, especially when Beth experiences an encounter with an invisible partner, a daring, jarringly sensual segment recalling Barbara Hershey's sexually abusive phantasm in 1982's “The Entity.”

For the record, the supporting cast features Vondie Curtis-Hall as Mel, a friendly neighbor, and Sarah Goldberg as Claire, one of Beth's fellow teachers. (Beth apparently has no actual longtime friends or relatives to help her through the grieving process.)

I'd have mentioned Mel and Claire earlier, but their sounding-board functions here are so flimsy that if they were removed from the movie, the plot would remain intact.

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Starring: Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Evan Jonigkeit

Directed by: David Bruckner

Other: A Searchlight Pictures release in theaters. Rated R for language, sexual situations, violence. 110 minutes