Your ordinary shot begins with a camera glide through a modest but dilapidated house. In the house’s corridors are dead, mummified corpses. Screaming is audible from a door that is slightly open which leads to the basement. We walk down creaky stairs to a body charred so badly that smoke is still steaming from the charcoaled skin. Its hand is outstretched to the glass jar filled with black smoke. This jar is a metaphor for the hardships faced by the Indian inhabitants of this white suburb.
Bishal Dutta has deftly captured the feeling of terror in “It Lives Inside”, the feature directorial debut,” Dutta trades cultural myth and traditional atmospheric horror to execute his ideas. The story revolves around Samidha, played magnificently by Megan Suri. Samidha, or Sam as she prefers to be called, is a headstrong, overly popular student which gives her one of the constituents necessary to live a fictional life. Sam has a crush on the popular boy at school (Gage Marsh) and an overbearing mother, in this case (Neeru Bajwa). Well, her former best friend, Tamira (Mohana Krishna), tries to pull herself together. Sleep-deprived and talking to herself, she totes the same glass jar we saw earlier, because there is not much to pull together.
It begins to worry her teacher Joyce (Betty Gabriel), who Sam suspects would approach her first. Sam is pulled aside by Joyce, who then asks her to speak with Tamira.
Sam, regrettably, does not want to be linked to the “crazy” brown person and dismisses Joyce’s persistent requests to stay together. She also chooses to ignore Tamira’s tale regarding a ghost that is reportedly stalking her. Sam doesn’t trust her friend until, quite by accident, she breaks the jar. Things take a turn for the worse when Tamira goes missing in a most eerie fashion. This creature, which possesses the ability to sweep and rip apart anything that is shadowed, begins mingling around the edges of Sam’s dreams and to Sam’s horror begins ripping apart everyone around her. In between lies a film that oscillates between a coming of age story and a depiction of the immigrant experience, yet fails to deliver in proper coherence.
The workings of film’s monster, a Pishach, will be most reminiscent to “The Babadook” in its possession of logic. Both entities are equipped with a clear intention of terrifying their victims and isolating them on a psychological level, and so they are able to exercise supreme control. But the beast from Hindu and Buddhist mythology have existed even before Jennifer Kent’s movie, having roots that underscore the widespread nature of loneliness and its ability to distort the mind. The film embodies that feeling of otherness, particularly the one that Black and Brown people face while trying to fit into a largely White society. Sometimes out of necessity. For example, Sam prefers to go by an English name rather than her Indian name, chooses to socialize with marginalized white classmates instead of Tamira, never makes an effort to speak Hindi, and most importantly, doesn’t let anyone into his house.
Those choices put her in conflict with her traditional mother and created the typical tensions that arise between parents and first generation Americans.
Dutta’s propulsion towards assimilation, more so than that shown by Remi Weekes in “His House,” another horror movie attached to the immigrant experience, is something one longs for. Dutta seems to suggest wistfully that this may be the road he wants to take: The monster has some roots in India and it has been passed around among many Indians who have been isolated. Dutta, however, is more interested in constructing a less than credible suburban teenage tale.
Just like any teenager, Sam wants to feel accepted, especially when the stakes involve cultural punishment. After all, she is a social outcast. When one of her teenage friends is killed in front of her, we don’t see the consequences of that action for Sam at school. She just keeps going. And for these pearl-clutching white folks who are so cautious of Brown people, they certainly aren’t looking for any answers. There is no police, no help from the child’s family, no confrontation between Sam and literally anyone in this community. It makes no sense.
In order to achieve the goal of being a teen movie, it is necessary to engage the viewers in the attitude, instead of relying on other parts taken from other films.
Nothing but a visual grammar confines the audience: Close-ups (which are engaging) allow Dutta and cinematographer Matthew Lynn to shoot to their hearts’ content, yet their fondness for Spike Lee’s signature double dolly shot is also quite famous. Rather than using it at the right time, which is more impactful, at the height of the action, they attempt to do so thrice, each attempt diminishing in success. Unsuccessful match cuts designed to create horror just do not work, nor does the sound design. The final freak-out where Sam faces off against the monster in the him retreated into one increasingly protracted the pacing. It started to lose rhythm and pace as Dutta tried to find the exit for a sequel.
An Indian-American horror story, especially one that takes places in suburbia, should have opened the floodgates for creativity in the seams. Instead of saying Dutta’s film, “It Lives Inside,” is, on the surface, an undistinguished film does so for it simply lacks in plot, themes, and tension.
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