Apart from being difficult to properly pull off, horror cinema also has a complicated history when it comes to representation. In recent years, filmmakers have made a marked effort to redefine some of the genre’s most problematic tropes, notable examples including Jordan Peele’s bold recentering of the black narrative within horror in 2017’s Get Out and – perhaps lesser known – the eerie metaphorical terror of Remi Weekes’ 2020 political refugee thriller His House, among others. In this sense, it shouldn’t be surprising that It Lives Inside, the feature debut of director Bishal Dutta, is being marketed as “from the producers of Get Out.” Like that film, it seeks to redefine traditional genre trappings through the not-so-subtle metaphorical exploration of living as a minority within the United States. Unlike that film, however, It Lives Inside is ultimately unable to meaningfully utilize its promising thematic credentials, devolving into an uninspired genre flick that, welcome representation aside, is too generic to justify its unrelentingly grim execution.
In the interest of fairness, Dutta’s film begins with promise. An unsettling tracking shot winds through a dimly-lit house where a violent struggle is occurring off-screen. Torn-up and bloodied bodies lie against the hall, and by the time we reach the scene of the encounter, all that’s left is a badly-burned corpse and a mysterious mason jar wobbling on the red-stained floor. This brief prologue segues us into the main narrative, centered around Samidha (Megan Suri), an Indian-American teenager living a relatively typical, if not bucolic, suburban adolescence, requisite with a potentially mutual high school crush and a tenuous relationship with her more-conservative mother. Samidha’s urge to assimilate has distanced her from her family’s East Indian roots and led to a bad falling out with her former best friend, Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), since ostracized by her overwhelmingly-white classmates as “weird” and “creepy.” When Samidha callously rejects Tamira’s pleas for help dealing with an unspecified entity, she unconsciously unleashes the ages-old demon onto herself and her loved ones.
Initially novel, the limitations of It Lives Inside’s rote execution become apparent early on. Dutta is a competent horror craftsman, setting up several effective jump scares early in the film’s runtime, but he flails badly with his screenplay, co-written with Ashish Mehta. Contained within the story’s text are absorbing and potentially difficult themes concerning the nature of cultural integration and the navigation of religious tradition, but very little time is given to properly explore these issues with any nuance. Samidha’s mother, Poorna (Neeru Bajwa) is a potentially fascinating but one-note character who can’t understand her daughter’s desire to fit in until she suddenly becomes helpful in the final third (has there ever been a worse trope in horror than the third act info dump?). Additionally, barely any consideration is given to develop Samidha and Tamira’s relationship before their falling out, perplexing given that so much of the narrative hinges on the supposed strength of their friendship. Attention is paid early on to minor but alienating microaggressions that Samidha experiences from her friends at school (“can you say that in Hindi?”). But stylistically, there’s nothing to differentiate It Lives Inside from the multitudes of other gloomy horror offerings that have come out in recent years.
With moody cinematography and a retro synth-tinged soundtrack, Dutta seems more interested in capturing the forbidding, bleakly ambiguous atmosphere of popular A24 horror offerings like It Follows and Hereditary (It Lives Inside is, by contrast, distributed by NEON), which similarly weaponized demonic terror alternately as a metaphor for grief, suburban ennui and the uneasiness of growing up. But those films also had strong characters to which the audience could attach themselves, justifying their sometimes unpleasantly nasty edge with a clear and thorough examination of cogent themes. In execution, Dutta has made a film that more closely resembles last year’s Smile, a similarly grim but shallow offering with a dubious mean streak. Like that film, It Lives Inside takes a bold swing with its ending, but the lack of proper buildup prevents that nifty takeaway from feeling truly unsettling.
This leaves the monster, which is admittedly quite effective… for a time. The Dharmic demon at the film’s center is a pishacha, a flesh-eating entity that feeds on loneliness and despair. Hiding his monster in the shadows, Dutta makes appropriately creepy use of growling sound design and ominous bone-crackly movements, since the creature can render itself invisible at will. Credit should be given to the makeup, art and visual effects departments who brought the pishacha to life – no doubt an impressive feat of creature design. Unfortunately, the fully-revealed demon can only be described as looking somewhere between a ‘70s-era Toho Kaiju and the (much better looking) cousin of the monster from Larry Buchanan’s Z-movie It’s Alive! (1969 – look it up). It would be charming if the film wasn’t intent on being taken so deathly seriously. Any visceral impact is further hampered by a disappointing PG-13 rating, often cutting away from its most gruesome moments to avoid full impact. An exceptionally cruel sequence involving a swing set is representative of this issue: we see blood spray, but where is it coming from, exactly? In this case, over-editing has betrayed a nightmarish concept. Like the rest of the movie, these moments suggest a film whose intentions outweigh its execution. It Lives Inside has unique components, but it’s as ordinary a horror movie as they come.
Photo courtesy of NEON
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