The House at the End of the Street

Jennifer Lawrence in The House at the End of the Street.
Photo courtesy of Relativity Media.

The good news is there’s slightly more going on in the impossibly generic-looking thriller The House at the End of the Street than you’d expect from the trailer. The bad news is that despite throwing about half-a-dozen potential potboiler concepts at the wall, what sticks is little more than a sampler menu of horror/suspense clichés for unassuming 14-year-old girls. While I have to admit that the the setup kept me guessing longer than most B-grade multiplex-padding thrillers usually do, the end product amounts to little more than an episode of Goosebumps.

Elissa (Jennifer Lawrence) is a streetwise teenager from Chicago who relocates to an affluent semi-rural suburb with her mother (Elizabeth Shue) for the ever-popular “fresh start.” They get a great deal on a house because the one next door was the scene of a grisly double murder years before, when a little girl brutally killed her parents (seen in a pre-credits sequence that closely mirrors the epileptic, sun-bleached style of the late Tony Scott).

What nobody told them is that the surviving son, Ryan (Max Thieriot), still lives in the house, being mopey and writing short stories at dusk. Fascinated by the sad, soulful boy next door (as usual, it’s a thin line between mysterious and balls-out insane), Elissa strikes up a friendship that soon reveals there are more sinister things afoot.

With its nearly bloodless carnage and overall message of “Mother knows best,” The House at the End of the Street seems squarely targeted at the Gossip Girl crowd and teenagers who’ve yet to discover beer bongs as a viable Friday night distraction. Despite overheated direction and an overly qualified cast, the film is never more than mildly engrossing. It shoots in so many directions that it manages to capture attention only to erode it slowly as the story hurtles towards its inevitable conclusion, complete with two-bit psychological analysis and worrisome misogyny.

While the talent assembled seeks to elevate this beyond the typical straight-to-DVD thriller, the material is pretty much warmed-over garbage, an unpalatable mix of Psycho, Twilight, Nell (!) and dozens of films too forgettable to mention. ■

The House at the End of the Street opens Sept. 21

Alex Rose blogs and podcasts about movies at Why Does it Exist? @whydoesitblog on Twitter.