Movie Review: I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House

The common explanation for ghosts is that they are spirits of dead people stuck between this world and the next, usually out of their own confusion.  They don't know if they are dead or alive - perhaps they forgot if they died, how they died, or what death even means. 

     These themes are at the heart of I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House, a Netflix original. However, the existential dilemma is explored with such cinematic and lyrical abstraction that some viewers may find it hard to enjoy the show.  That was not the case for me, though.  This film worked: not only did it provide a meditation on existence that avoids cliches and keeps the viewer wondering, it also entertains like a late-night, scary movie. 

     On the surface, a live-in hospice nurse, Lily, takes care of an old lady.   Watching Lily nervously move around the house, the viewer stays on edge and begins to realize the house is haunted.    But what makes this movie unique is the narrative's treatment of time.    The ghost is often stereotyped as an evil Other, intruding on the living, but seldom is the ghost's interior universe given a voice and a perspective.  Here, we get that. And while ghosts may be between lost in "space," wandering between this world and the unseen afterlife, we learn that they can just as easily be lost in time, wandering from  past to future, and from future backwards into the past.   So what we are seeing - as Lily gets shocked by poltergeists and unexplained phenomenon -  may be a haunting not from a death that happened but from a death that will happen. And why not?  It doesn't completely make logical sense, but then again, neither do life and death.

     Moreover, Lily learns that the old lady of the house, a horror novelist, has written a book that eerily seems to be about her, except her character is named Polly, not Lily.  It begins to seem like a prophecy, or a psychic vision of the future.  The old lady insists on calling  the nurse by the name she gave her book's protagonist; she even insists that Lily actually is Polly and will not hear otherwise.  This all implies  that Lily will die in this house, wandering aimlessly not just into the future, but backwards into the past to haunt her previous living self.    But are they really the same person?   And, ultimately, this movie doesn't give us easy answers. The worlds of the living and dead become a hall of mirrors, and the nature of identity, too, drifts into another obscure territory in a somewhat disjointed  circularity.  

     In short, this film is something special. I'll admit, I didn't want to watch it at first.  It seemed too complicated to give me that good, horror-movie feeling.    But I was wrong.  The camera shots, the music, the pacing, the small details added in well-placed repetition: the complete result resonated with a Gothic, otherworldly beauty that echoed in my mind long after the film ended.  -CLINT SABOM

Directed By: Osgood Perkins
Written By: Osgood Perkins
Produced By: Rob Paris, Robert Menzies
Starring: Ruth Wilson, Paula Prentiss
Release Date: October 28, 2016