So there’s horror, and then there’s horror. There’s all of the stock techniques and clichés that, when employed skillfully, still make for something scary, and those films are plenty popular and can even be really good, I’m not looking down my nose at them. But then there’s the horror that gets real, that grabs at the things that terrify us, that scar us in ways that move beyond basic escapism. Because that’s what a lot of horror is, a safe way to vent anxiety and fear, a place we can go where we can feel those feelings without having to experience the bite of whatever makes us feel those things in our waking life. We can walk away from the horror film and put those feelings away.
But then there’s the stuff that’s genuinely unsettling, and no, I don’t mean “extreme” horror or whatever. That kind of shit is usually boring and gross because there’s nothing to it, just escalating gore and pointless misanthropy. I’m talking about films that hook into the things that scare us outside of the movies. The things we can’t walk away from when the credits roll because they’re the sort of things waiting for us when the movie ends. In literature, The Shining is an excellent example because the book really is as much about Jack Torrance’s mounting fear at being unable to support his family at failing his wife and child and his inability to control his own rage as it is the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel. In film, The Babadook is an excellent example because even though there’s a ghost, that’s not Amelia’s problem. The problem is the grief and guilt she lives with and a son that can’t be left unsupervised, who is a danger to himself and others, and who she is beginning to realize might never be independent enough to let her live her own life. Those are the fears adulthood and circumstance bring to our door, and they’re waiting for us when our brief sojourns from them end.
All of this is really just to say that His House is definitely one of the latter films, a smart, vivid, understated story about the ghosts we bring with us, wherever we go.
We open in war-torn Sudan. A crowd of people are hurrying to a pickup truck, piling into the back to get out of the country, to escape their home. Civil war has already taken everything they have, and all they have left is to get out with their lives. Among them are Bol and Rial Majur, and their daughter Nyagak. The truck leads to a boat, and a dangerous nighttime escape over the water, no running lights, people as crammed on the deck as they were in the truck. There is a loud thud, and people fall overboard, including Nyagak. Bol and Rial lose their daughter at sea.
And now they’re in the bleak institutional nowhere of refugee detention in England. We come back to them on the day their case for asylum is to be heard. And miraculously, they are granted the status of “asylum-seeker,” which is better than “refugee” but not citizenship. So, from hell to limbo. They are assigned a caseworker, a stipend, a whole host of rules where any violations mean getting sent back to detention and likely having their appeal dismissed, which is a guaranteed return to the country they fled, but most importantly, a house. They will have a house.
Of course, it’s not much. It’s public housing, drab and sad, trash-strewn yards, barking dogs, scornful neighbors and roaming gangs of delinquents. The wallpaper is peeling, the lights don’t work, the doors don’t sit right on their hinges. But it’s all theirs. Which is unusual, because typically people in their situation are packed three and four families to one of these places. But it’s all theirs. And that’s all that matters to Bol. They have a home in their new country. A new place to call home, far away from strife and death, far away from what they left behind. He’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
At least, not until night comes, with strange scratching and scurrying sounds behind the walls. A face peering out at them from the dark.
A face that looks like Nyagak.
There are, simplistically, three different narrative layers at work here - first, there’s Bol and Rial’s grief, trauma, and survivor’s guilt. They have been through a lot. There’s whatever horrors they saw back home, the ones that drove them to flee, there’s the death of their daughter, and that they survived the journey when so many others did not, when so many others didn’t even make it out in the first place. They live with that constantly. Then there’s the constant low-level tension and menace that attends being a refugee in a country that does not want or welcome you and makes no bones about letting you know that. Finally, there’s whatever is happening inside the house. Bol and Rial are very sympathetic from the get-go, just two people displaced by war and trying to make the best of where they’ve landed, and we feel the weight on their shoulders, the way relief mingles with guilt for feeling relieved, the sense of displacement, being adrift in a strange and hostile land, and now even home, the one place that should feel safe, a place to which they are effectively confined for the most part, isn’t safe either. As things get worse for them (which, of course they do), we feel for them.
And this is true even at their worst, because they aren’t saints. They’re messy, imperfect people trying to make the best of a very bad situation, and they don’t always handle it with grace. There’s a tension between Bol’s almost desperate desire to assimilate to the culture of their new home and Rial’s resistance to it, which seems to be grounded in a weary awareness that they aren’t welcome here and a desire to hold onto the things she loves and values about the home she had to leave. They’ve been through a lot together, more than anyone should have to bear in a lifetime, but how they deal with that differs dramatically. Bol seems to be driven primarily by denial, by wanting to put the whole nightmare behind him and throw himself into the ways of his new home, to run from what he’s been through.
Denial is generally not the healthiest way to cope with things, and so Bol’s descent over the course of the film is most pronounced, but Rial’s seeing ghosts too. She’s just more willing to face them head-on because they’re a part of where they come from, they are part of their own cultural landscape, and so she faces them with resolve. It’s the world outside she struggles with the most. To this film’s credit, it doesn’t paint its characters in broad strokes - just as the Majurs aren’t saintly, the people surrounding them in their bleak little corner of England aren’t villains - just garden-variety bigots at worst, yelling “go back to Africa” or following them around in the department store, vigilant for shoplifting, or at best largely sympathetic but coming from a place that can’t comprehend the enormity of what’s brought them here. Every trip out of their depressing little house is weighed down with menace, with what could happen. And inside isn’t any better - if it’s not the ghosts that come at night, it’s the constant weight of bureaucracy - periodic meetings, no outside employment to supplement a meager income, no social gatherings, no candles, no games, just sit tight while we review your case and maybe…just maybe, if you don’t slip up once…you’ll be upgraded from asylum-seekers to potential citizens. Maybe. If you’re lucky and never make a mistake.
So there’s the horror of where they’ve been, the horror of where they are, and the horror of what seems to have come with them, all pressing down at once. As a result, the film has very little downtime, there’s a constant thread of unease running through it that is only sharpened as the ghosts they face make their presence more and more known over the course of the film. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another from minute to minute, and it works because the film rarely if ever overplays things. Strange noises, faces peering from holes in the walls, the sudden nightmarish juxtaposition of images from their past with their life in the present, handled often through startling, unexpected reveals that are never really telegraphed. Even the one moment I was expecting the obvious jump scare never really came. There’s maybe some slightly dodgy practical creature effects toward the end, but it’s a strong enough sequence that it’s easy enough to overlook, and it comes in the wake of a revelation that I’d argue is the most horrifying thing here, though it’s the sort of thing most folks would say wasn’t “really” horror. I envy them their lives that they can think this way, because it suggests they’ve never dealt with the sort of thing Bol and Rial have, or any number of other real-world horrors. There are things that stay with you for your entire life, that follow you, that you can’t walk away from, and what you do with them makes the difference between living your life, finding a home, or forever being chased by them, wherever you go.
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