His House
At first, the walls are what frighten you. Noises seem to come from inside them, voices emerge after dark, figures appear where nobody should be standing, and a pale face glimpsed in the shadows is genuinely unsettling. For a substantial part of its running time, His House works extremely well as a haunted-house film. Then it becomes clear that Remi Weekes is talking about something far more disturbing.
Bol and Rial have escaped South Sudan and are given a house in England while trying to begin a new life. What should represent safety is cold, damaged and hostile, but the outside world is hardly warmer. They are not simply treated as people who have survived something terrible; they constantly seem required to prove that they deserve the chance they have been given. Matt Smith is particularly effective at embodying a kind of administrative politeness that never quite becomes human warmth.
Weekes gradually turns the house into an extension of its inhabitants. Walls crack, spaces seem to conceal memories, and the building becomes increasingly threatening as everything Bol and Rial hoped to leave behind begins to occupy it. Jo Willems' cinematography makes excellent use of darkness and empty space. The film does not need to turn every room into a fairground attraction to make the house frightening.
But the film changes once we begin to understand what its characters are carrying with them.
At that point, I became less interested in what might be inside the house and much more interested in what was inside them. The supernatural horror increasingly becomes the physical shape of guilt that cannot simply be abandoned by crossing a border. That is much more compelling to me than the usual explanation that a house is haunted because something awful once happened there.
Bol and Rial also deal with their past very differently. He wants to look forward, assimilate and convince himself that a new life can erase the old one. She seems to understand much earlier that some things do not disappear merely because we refuse to look at them. Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù and Wunmi Mosaku are excellent because they never portray trauma in the same way. Mosaku in particular gives Rial a mixture of pain, exhaustion and clarity that becomes deeply moving.
The film is also intelligent in the way it approaches the refugee experience without abandoning horror. Migration is not a worthy social subject placed around a conventional ghost story: the two elements are inseparable. Fear of losing a home, belonging nowhere, being expected to feel grateful even while being humiliated, and living with whatever was done or witnessed in order to survive all feed directly into the supernatural.
That is why the observation made by several critics feels so accurate: the dead are frightening here, but the living are ultimately more disturbing. Weekes takes one of horror cinema's most overused forms and finds a remarkably personal way into it.
Not everything is equally effective. Once the mythology becomes more explicit, some of the raw fear of the first half disappears, and I found the climax less unsettling than the earlier apparitions. The horror becomes less frightening at exactly the point where the emotional drama becomes stronger. In my case, however, that did not hurt the film much because it replaced fear with something that affected me more deeply.
By the end, I was crying.
That completely changed my response to it. I began the film staring into dark corners, waiting for something to appear. I finished it thinking about grief, loss and the guilt carried by people who may have escaped physically without ever truly escaping what happened to them.
His House is frightening when it wants to be, but its best ghosts do not live inside walls. We carry them with us.
Bol and Rial have escaped South Sudan and are given a house in England while trying to begin a new life. What should represent safety is cold, damaged and hostile, but the outside world is hardly warmer. They are not simply treated as people who have survived something terrible; they constantly seem required to prove that they deserve the chance they have been given. Matt Smith is particularly effective at embodying a kind of administrative politeness that never quite becomes human warmth.
Weekes gradually turns the house into an extension of its inhabitants. Walls crack, spaces seem to conceal memories, and the building becomes increasingly threatening as everything Bol and Rial hoped to leave behind begins to occupy it. Jo Willems' cinematography makes excellent use of darkness and empty space. The film does not need to turn every room into a fairground attraction to make the house frightening.
But the film changes once we begin to understand what its characters are carrying with them.
At that point, I became less interested in what might be inside the house and much more interested in what was inside them. The supernatural horror increasingly becomes the physical shape of guilt that cannot simply be abandoned by crossing a border. That is much more compelling to me than the usual explanation that a house is haunted because something awful once happened there.
Bol and Rial also deal with their past very differently. He wants to look forward, assimilate and convince himself that a new life can erase the old one. She seems to understand much earlier that some things do not disappear merely because we refuse to look at them. Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù and Wunmi Mosaku are excellent because they never portray trauma in the same way. Mosaku in particular gives Rial a mixture of pain, exhaustion and clarity that becomes deeply moving.
The film is also intelligent in the way it approaches the refugee experience without abandoning horror. Migration is not a worthy social subject placed around a conventional ghost story: the two elements are inseparable. Fear of losing a home, belonging nowhere, being expected to feel grateful even while being humiliated, and living with whatever was done or witnessed in order to survive all feed directly into the supernatural.
That is why the observation made by several critics feels so accurate: the dead are frightening here, but the living are ultimately more disturbing. Weekes takes one of horror cinema's most overused forms and finds a remarkably personal way into it.
Not everything is equally effective. Once the mythology becomes more explicit, some of the raw fear of the first half disappears, and I found the climax less unsettling than the earlier apparitions. The horror becomes less frightening at exactly the point where the emotional drama becomes stronger. In my case, however, that did not hurt the film much because it replaced fear with something that affected me more deeply.
By the end, I was crying.
That completely changed my response to it. I began the film staring into dark corners, waiting for something to appear. I finished it thinking about grief, loss and the guilt carried by people who may have escaped physically without ever truly escaping what happened to them.
His House is frightening when it wants to be, but its best ghosts do not live inside walls. We carry them with us.
Mini Review: At first, the walls are what frighten you. Noises seem to come from inside them, voices emerge after dark, figures appear where nobody should be standing, and a pale face glimpsed in the shadows is genuinely unsettling. For a substantial part of its running time, His House works extremely well as a haunted-house film. Then it becomes clear that Remi Weekes is talking about something far more disturbing. Bol and Rial have escaped South Sudan and...
