One of the missing pleasures of the deep summer months: watching a horror movie with a sold-out crowd, escaping the heat and myriad pressures of the season

Brown’s grisly indie horror flick is yet another piece of work that feels unexpectedly suited to our times.

Review: The Beach House (Jeffrey A. Brown, 2019) Jeffrey A. Brown’s debut feature The Beach House is a nice punchy little reminder that in filmmaking, a little can sometimes go a long way. Reminiscent in its scale and apocalyptic focus of A.T. White’s Starfish (2018), although very different films both movies situate central young women protagonists in…

A weekend getaway turns into an "extinction event" in Jeffrey A. Brown's intriguing, ambiguous eco-thriller.

In the spirit of 1950s sci-fi comes Jeffrey A. Brown’s gripping debut feature. Recent college dropout Randall (Noah Le Gros) is content at the thought of spending an eternity bumming around his father’s spacious waterfront property. Emily (masterfully played by Liana Liberato), his semi-estranged girlfriend, is a brilliant college student eager to attend grad school. (Liberato is one of the few young actresses around capable of convincingly pulling off the role of organic chemistry major.) What is meant to be a weekend devoted to romantic reconciliation gets disrupted, first when an oddball pair of dad’s old friends, already granted use of the space, show up, followed by strange atmospheric phenomena materializing on land and sea. Because I don’t want to keep audiences away, I am loath to peg this as a cautionary fable about climate change. The point is there, but never hammered. And the film offers no explanations; the horror lies just out of sight, somewhere below the horizon line.

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The character drama becomes afterthought as it’s superseded by action.