His House (2020)
Released on Netflix last fall with little fanfare, this was one of the best releases of 2020 and a really impressive first feature from writer-director, Remi Weekes (officially one to watch). The initial premise is an emotionally fraught spin on a haunted house story: a Sudanese couple manage to escape civil war and make it to the UK as asylum seekers, losing their daughter to the Mediterranean. They are sent to a bleak town somewhere in England and set up in a run-down house. As refugees, they are instructed to fit in, to not ‘be a problem,’ to assimilate. They are also told that they cannot leave this house and if they do, it could be grounds for denying their asylum. Of course, the house is haunted.
We see the husband try hard to acclimate and adopt local custom and dress while the wife tries to hold on to her culture, her past, herself. The haunting serves to exacerbate the conflicts between them. And their refugee status serves to answer the question of ‘why don’t they just leave?’ All of the horror, and there is solid, grisly, gooey, unsettling horror, feels like a metaphor for the experience of being an asylum seeker, needing to do everything you can to stay in a place that does not want you there, that tries to intimidate you out, or at least, make your life hell, constantly underlining how much you don’t belong. Often stories of hauntings turn on economic stress – there is a reason this family needs this home and is unwilling to leave, however bad things get. This iteration raises the stakes to the Nth degree in a mutually beneficial fashion – the haunting increases the drama of their emotional situation and that emotion in turn feeds the haunting.
And it all builds to a hell of a third act twist as we come to understand what is really haunting them, how personal it is, and how inescapable. This is not a randomly haunted house, but they are followed by their own ghosts, by the guilt of the horrible choices they have had to make to survive, and there is a real question as to whether it is possible to move forward, to live with those ghosts, to carry the weight of their own decisions and the memories of those left behind. It is really a great, interesting, scary, and meaningful flick.