Review: His House
Over the last few years there has been a rise in horror movies that use horror as an allegory for a much more real experience, be it grief in the case of The Babadook or racism in the case of Get Out, it’s something that, as a big fan of the horror genre, I’ve found to be interesting and refreshing to witness. Going into Netflix’s His House I knew that it would follow a similar path but the film manages to take it’s allegory and provide not only a solid haunted house movie, but a slow descent of a marriage faced with the refugee experience.
In short, it’s pretty great.
Set in modern day England on the outskirts of London, the film follows husband and wife Bol and Rial Majur, a couple from South Sudan who escaped the war torn region and crossed the channel into England, however at the cost of their daughter Nyagak who drowned in their escape. After several months of waiting the couple are finally granted as asylum seekers and given a house, however the house is rotted, dilapidated and run-down and there are several arbitrary rules they must follow or risk being sent back to Sudan.
Despite this, the couple try to make the most of their new situation but both have conflicting views on how to approach this. Bol tries to assimilate himself into UK culture, changing his clothes to fit in, joining in with football chants and eating with cutlery whilst Rial holds onto her cultural heritage, wearing her traditional garments, eating with her hands and most importantly, clinging onto the memory of Nyagak who Bol seems intent on moving on from. Not long after their arrival though, the couple begin to experience strange, unnerving visions of Nyagak and other mysterious beings living in the walls of their house, Bol believes it to be the stress of assimilating into Britain and the trauma of what happened in Sudan but Rial is adamant that it is an Apeth, a Sudanese folklore creature who has followed them looking for a debt which needs to be repaid, and likely paid in blood.
There is a really good story here, slow burning but one that factors in the allegorical elements that I’ve enjoyed about modern horror with grief, trauma and elements of guilt later on and places it into a serious drama about a husband and wife trying to cope with the loss of their child and stress of being strangers in a strange land. The decision to have Bol and Rial tackle the visions differently not only worked for both their characters – which I’ll explain in more detail in a moment – but also bypassed a lot of the more clichéd elements of a haunted house film by having both of them realise fairly early on that the house is haunted an immediately dealing with it rather than spending too much of the runtime trying to figure out what’s going on.
The only part I’m not 100% on is the ending, which is a shame because up until then it was working really well with a lot of the reveals about what’s brought the Apeth to Bol and Rial packing more of a punch than I was expecting. But for such a creepy, foreboding film, the ending feels like it gets a little too... showy I guess would be the right word. It’s not bad, just a little too different to what’s come beforehand.
While there is a supporting cast their roles don’t add up to much, mainly just social workers who have seen Bol and Rial’s story hundreds of times over and have grown numb to the experience, the only name actor you’ll likely recognise is Matt Smith as Mark, the case worker assigned to them and their integration, it’s a small but decent role for Smith, balancing out the company man trying to toe the line and keep his job with the human not wanting to be the reason someone is thrown back to a warzone. There is some minor evidence of xenophobia in what he’s says, maybe I’m reading too much into him, maybe I’m not reading enough, it’s not outright racism but the implications are there and I imagine his character is designed to have different reactions from different people depending on your background and experiences with British councils.
Truly though this film belongs to Bol and Rial, played by Sope Dirisu and Wunmi Mosaku respectively, this double-act works so well for the film and what they go through and both actors deliver some pretty damn great performances. Dirisu as Bol has a tough line to balance since Bol clearly wants to make a new start in the UK but at the expense of his own culture and the memory of his daughter it could’ve easily fallen into the trap of making him too unlikable, but Dirisu manages to give Bol an ambitious charm and a want to move on from the traumas of his past that’s relatable if slightly iffy about how much he’s closing himself off to the past. Out of the two of them, Bol is the one who’s most accosted by the visions, often seeing disturbing faces in his walls and suffering from intense nightmares about the ocean that took his daughter, it’s here where Dirisu is given some of his best work, switching between a man who recognises the dreams are harmless visions in his own head and a man so scared by what he sees that he’s driven to anger or catatonic fear over what he sees. It’s a strong performance and one that is admittedly ambiguous as to what you should feel about Bol given some of his decisions later in the film, but Dirisu’s terrified performance keeps you sympathising with him as he faces the potentially real ghosts of his past.
Conversely, Mosaku is given a more understated but no less impressively role as Rial, where Bol tries to fit into British society as best he can, Rial tries to hold onto as much of her culture as she can, often speaking her native Dinka to the annoyance of Bol who predominantly speaks English. While at first Rial seems to be resigned to little more than the grieving mother faced with hostility both outside and inside her own home, as the film goes on you see that her experiences with the ghosts aren’t as frightening as Bol’s, not positive but definitely on a neutral scale, she sees them and acknowledges them but there’s no attacking, she’s not forced to live out the same nightmares as her husband although what she faces is a more sinister and manipulative tactic that I won’t spoil here. Where Dirisu balances Bol between unlikeable and sympathetic, Mosaku keeps a good balance between Rial’s strengths and her weaknesses, the most she faces the prejudices of her new surroundings the more she puts her foot down and refuses to give up who she is or where she’s come from, but the expense of doing this means that when the visions remind her of what’s she’s lost she’s crippled by the grief and the guilt over losing her daughter. Rial is an incredibly well-rounded character and Mosaku absolutely makes the most out of every little scene she’s given.
Writer/Director Remi Weekes makes his feature debut here and it’s an impressive first outing, on a purely horror front there’s some decent scares to be had, not outright terrifying but the unnerving aspect of some of Bol’s visions are effective, particularly when the ghosts turn violent. Weekes does factor in some haunted house clichés to keep audiences in a familiar realm but he twists them on their head to keep you guessing, the biggest one I can remember is the ghosts appearing in the dark so when Bol turns the lights on they disappear, only for that to prove ineffective later on down the line. It’s not scary in what I’d call the traditional sense, but it keeps you guessing whenever horror is to be found and I appreciate that about it.
Where the film really shines is in how it portrays the refugee experience, now I’ve no knowledge of what real people like Bol and Rial have to face but I can imagine it’s fairly similar to what’s shown here, ignorant locals calling them out for being given a home whilst in reality their home is a piece of shit nobody would want anyway. If it wasn’t for the horror elements this could’ve been mistaken for a serious racial drama and Weekes leans into that at times, the racism angle wasn’t as big as I was expecting but it’s not ignored either, some scenes are more evident with a group of teenage boys telling Rial to ‘go back to Africa’ – cleverly all the boys are Black British showing that racism comes from more than just skin colour – whilst others are more subtle like when a security guard starts following Bol when he enters a shop just because he’s a black man. Race isn’t a factor in the story, but it’s still part of the stress that piles onto Bol and Rial as they’re faced by these increasingly disturbed visions.
It’s interesting to note that Bol sees the worst visions when he’s the one who’s trying to fit into society while Rial has more unassuming experiences but faces a more harsh xenophobia in the streets. I don’t think the film is wholly Anti-Assimilation – going by the ending that wouldn’t fit – but it does paint a warning for refuges sold on the lie of a Britain torn from the pages of a Jane Austin novel when in fact it’s a concrete jungle filled with shitty council estates and balding middle-aged Brexit voters. Hell thinking about it, I think the reason the horror doesn’t hit me as traditionally scary is because they aren’t designed to be the most frightening elements, it’s actually the reality of the immigrant experience that’s the real horror, being given a piece of shit with walls and told you can’t leave – which gives them a good reason for not abandoning the house because the literally have nowhere else –, you’re given £74 a week to live on and told you can’t work to gain more, you have to follow their rules and understand their lives when they couldn’t care about yours. The Apeth gives a tangible foe for Bol and Rial to face off against as their marriage is attacked by the trauma of the past and what they’ve gone through together, but that fear of being ‘the outsider’ is a harder fight still to come.
His House might not have the social comedy of Get Out or the intensity of The Babadook but it’s still worthy of being in the same conversations with them because it captures that similar feeling of grief-stricken horror and works wonders with it. Taking the traditional haunted house formula and taking it in a new direction towards the very real horrors of trauma, guilt and xenophobia, Weekes twists a subtle knife through the entire film and for a first feature his ability to unnerve you is already something to behold. Combined with the duo of Dirisu and Mosaku as the struggling Bol and the traumatised Rial facing terror both real and psychological from every angle and you have a film that, despite a couple missteps, makes one solid impact worth experiencing.
8/10