His House

His House tells the story of a couple fleeing war-torn South Sudan, and end up the only survivors of their ship when it sinks crossing the English Channel coming from France. They find asylum in England and are assigned a squalid house with a meager stipend on a probationary basis. Meanwhile, the couple are grieving the loss of a child in the boat wreck. What follows is a movie that, on the surface, is a haunted house story, with many ghosts, including the little girl lost in the journey, tormenting them in different ways. First off, I have to compliment this movie’s delicate touch in handling the culture of its main characters, Bol (the husband) and Rial (the wife). Their beliefs very much drive what they are seeing and how they process it — Bol believes it to be demons or ghosts, while Rial is convinced it is an apeth (a night witch). The film never makes light of this or treats it lightly; it is sacrosanct to them, and therefore, it is to the movie. The principle actors handle their roles perfectly, as Bol tries to compartmentalize his feelings and deny what he’s seeing, but is slowly driven to madness. Rial, meanwhile, is also haunted, but stoically, silently, knowing this grim situation has a grimmer ending. They also argue over what they haunting means and how it relates to the little girl, Nyagak. The movie plays off these threads and makes it feel like the haunting is a parallel to parental grief, and if it had stayed that it, it would’ve been immensely clever. But then it throws in the late movie twist that Nyagak is not their daughter; they kidnapped her in a crowd as a way to get on board a truck fleeing the area. There is no grief, except perhaps survivor’s guilt. Rial’s motherly feelings are a fraud. The debt that the ghost has been seeking the entire time is tied to having kidnapped this girl and being the cause of her demise. The demon offers Rial the opportunity to bring back Nyagak if Bol dies, but in the end, she kills the demon, acknowledging her guilt and living with it instead of living in the fantasy of motherhood she’s created in her mind. Unfortunately, where the movie fails is in three ways: one, it fails to really push this narrative at the end. The movie never fills in these emotional beats. That leads to problem two: because the whole parental grief parallel is lost when the twist is revealed, and given the way the ending is framed, it gives the movie an American Psycho feeling of “did any of it really happen”, which undermines the entire movie. But perhaps worst is the movie is just SLOW. It is paced so languidly, and with nothing but jump scares and marital tension over fake parental grief to keep the movie going forward, it feels twice as long as it’s barely 90 minute runtime. 80 of it is extraordinarily slow build, and then the climax comes out of the blue (after an extended flashback where the twist is revealed), lasts five minutes, then five minutes of denouement. It’s the longest build for a very, VERY minimal payoff, and it feels cheap. More, it feels like a cheat. This movie should be a lot more than it is. It has the bones to be truly amazing. But it gets too clever with itself and becomes a tiresome slog to get to an ending that feels more like a stop. If it had killed the husband, or shown that this all WAS some kind of parental grief shared delusion, it would’ve been better. But this movie lacks the courage to be that bold, or the scares to be anything more than a pot-boiler on low.