I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House: Not With A Scream, But With A Whisper

Ghost stories tend to have two central components: The person or people who died, and the place where they died. Not always, you occasionally get stories about what Ghostbusters would call a “Class Five Full-Roaming Vapor,” something that haunts people rather than places, but a lot of ghost stories tie the spirit or spirits to a place. Something happened there that has kept them there forever, and largely films that follow this track present the ghost as a puzzle to be solved - if the protagonists can figure out why this spirit haunts this place, they can put it to rest. Victory (or survival) relies on understanding.

I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House is an ambitious film in many ways, not least of which is in how it seeks to overturn those two basic assumptions. Unfortunately, its ambition  sometimes gets in the way of telling an effective story.

It opens with a monologue:

“I have heard it said that a house with a death in it can never again be bought or sold by the living.

It can only be borrowed from the ghosts that have stayed behind. To go back and forth, letting out and gathering back in again. Worrying over the floors in confused circles. Tending to their deaths like patchy, withered gardens. They have stayed to look back for a glimpse of the very last moments of their lives. But the memories of their own deaths are faces on the wrong side of wet windows, smeared by rain. Impossible to properly see.

There is nothing that chains them to the places where their bodies have fallen. They are free to go, but still they confine themselves, held in place by their looking. For those who have stayed, their prison is their never seeing. And left all alone, this is how they rot.”

With these words, we are introduced to Lily Saylor, a hospice nurse who has just arrived in Braintree, Massachusetts, for her next assignment. She’s going to be caring for successful novelist Iris Blum, whose books Lily describes as the kind often purchased in airports and supermarkets. It’s a nice, economical image. Iris is frail, barely there, her mind going and on the way to gone. It’s a big, old house, and it’s very quiet. Lily’s monologue continues: “Three days ago, I turned 28 years old.”

“I will never be 29 years old.”

So right up front, we know Lily is not long for this world. So the rest of the film is about how it happens, not what happens, and this lends the film a nice, sustained hum of unease throughout. On paper, there’s really not a lot to this film - Lily takes care of Iris, and soon notices that some things are amiss with both the house and Iris. Things go bump in the night, and Iris keeps referring to her as “Polly,” which is weird, because the only Polly in Iris’ life was the protagonist of her novel The Lady In The Walls, a protagonist who meets a gruesome end.

The film is basically Lily’s investigation into these things, and the story unfolds gradually, drawing connections between Lily, Iris, and Polly without being excessively expository about it. This is not a film about excessive detail (except when it is, to its detriment, but more on that later), and it relies on lots of small gestures to communicate information and set a mood. It’s a nice change from more conventional ghost-story narratives where it’s the ghost itself that leads the protagonist to understanding, and really, the film’s thesis is pretty much spelled out in the introductory monologue - we think ghosts are tethered to their places, but they aren’t, and we think understanding their demise will solve their continued existence, but it won’t.

It’s not that we’re denied understanding - we get a sense of what has happened, is happening, will happen - it’s just presented gradually, in isolated moments that all happen in the same place, but at different times. And that feeds into the mood this film sets: Everyone is sort of unstuck in time - Iris by dementia, Lily by being alone in this big  house with Iris, so everything’s sort of untethered to start with. It feels like Lily’s telling us what happened after it already happened. The film is made up of lots of long shots of empty spaces, or at most two people, sometimes talking but as often not, the silences and conversations alike filled with empty air. Everything is punctuated by slow fades and dissolves, which gives it a dreamlike feeling. That, combined with the unease that we feel knowing what’s coming (if not how), is nicely jolting when the dreaminess is interrupted, which it is in ways sparing but precisely sharp.

So, then, this is a slow, mannered ghost story. It creates an evocative atmosphere, but it’s also, I think, perhaps too mannered in other ways. It’s kind of an odd duck in that it’s a contemporary film (roughly speaking, it appears to be a circa 1970s period piece) that feels like it’s going for the kind of stiffness and formality of speech and manner you’d associate with Henry James, and although this and the general airlessness of it aren’t necessarily a bad thing (it certainly helps to sell an atmosphere of slight unreality), there are a couple of points where it tips overboard. For example, the opening monologue as excerpted above begins well, but it goes on a little long and starts rambling, belaboring its point, and the moment dissipates. This film relies heavily on space and silence to create its atmosphere, so when a character starts to rabbit on about how beauty cannot truly see itself (and at its worst it really is some highfalutin’ nonsense), and does so in the stilted  manner in which everyone in this film speaks, it threatens to kill the mood it’s so assiduously created.

I don’t think it’s a deal-breaker - there’s a lot to like about this film, though it’s so stylized as to likely be an acquired taste, but its strength lies in minimalism, so when it abandons that and does so in a way that leads our attention to wander, it’s irritating. This film is at its best in stillness and hush, at whispering its awful secrets to us.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix