His House (2020) - Movie Review

For the longest time, haunted house movies have been plagued by a single question: Why the fuck haven’t you left yet? Easily one of the most mockable cliches in horror (and it’s not as if there’s nothing else to make fun of within the trope-ier corners of the genre), it has likewise fallen into the realm of cliché to even point it out. The presence of something beyond this world makes itself known to the family living in a new house, and because the plot demands it, they never question that they haven't taken that as a sign that maybe it's time to move.

Not that all movies hand-wave this away, though. During the 2010s, James Wan and Mike Flanagan treated the question with a lot of postmodern clarity, and even further back, Beetlejuice remains one of my favourite examples of the sub-genre purely because it answers that question in a delightfully kooky fashion. Today’s film, however, is far less kitschy. In fact, it makes for one of the more sobering features I’ve ever seen from the haunted house clique.

As refracted through the story of Bol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku), two South Sudanese refugees who are given asylum in London, the question becomes depressingly clear as to the answer why: Because they have to stay. They fled their war-torn home to find somewhere they could exist as themselves, and they went through hell to cross the ocean and make it to England. Sure, the lodgings they’ve been given are incredibly run-down, the neighbours are a heady mixture of obnoxious and casually racist, and the restrictions placed on their asylum insist they act better than the natives, but when put next to what they left behind… yeah, they stick with what they’ve got.

Or, at least, what they thought they left behind, because that kind of trauma doesn’t disappear so easily. The trauma of having to leave your home under such horrific circumstances, the guilt that you just happened to survive the journey when others didn’t, not to mention the underlying insistence that, in order to truly be naturalised, you must abandon the culture you were born into. You must assimilate entirely; not just respect the customs of your new home, but forsake your old one.

This is part of the reason why nationalists deal in so much culture war shit, arguing that since some cultures are inherently lesser than others (usually the predominantly white ones, in their mind), it should be ‘common sense’ to trade up. It’s also why people like Dinesh D’Souza exist, turning their backs on people in their exact same position just to save face (a scenario that gets played out in this film with almost-infuriating irony).

It’s a haunted house movie where the spirits are of the leads’ own design, symbols for the pain they experienced just to end up in less-than-ideal circumstances. The pacing around the scares is incredibly taut, and the imagery taps into cultural memory while also making for a nightmarish depiction of a couple tormented by their own psyches. As a visualisation of trauma and survivor’s guilt, it’s immensely visceral and feels like it’s cutting into something very real and just as tragic. It’s a story that could only come out of a specific cultural perspective, and in the midst of an increasingly turbulent time in British history, it’s a perspective that deserves this kind of utterly affecting media wrapped around it.