His House is certainly an interesting and unique horror film. I’ve never seen anything quite like it while, at the same time, it has tired and overused tropes that almost ruined the film (before course correcting).
The film is about a Sudanese couple who escape the war and seek refuge in England. They are given temporary refugee housing and told all the many things they cannot do while they await a final decision on whether they can stay. And then a ghost starts haunting their new home, one that followed them from Sudan.
On the plus side, there’s a very good reason they don’t just move (as the old jokes goes) since they aren’t allowed to find new housing due to their in-between status. On the negative side, at first, the haunting is your typical, run-of-the-mill spook show stuff that you’ve seen in a hundred other movies. Yes, the ghosts look different, almost more like zombies, but they do all the same rattling the walls, walking in front of the camera, etc. As if they really needed to emigrate from Africa just to mess with people.
During these opening sequences, I was really wishing this wasn’t a supernatural horror movie since the alienation, isolation, and suspicion the couple experiences in England was plenty horror enough. I wished the movie had been that alone, cut the ghosts out of the equation.
But then the movie starts to reveal more about the spooks and why they are haunting and the film picked up considerably. We get motivations and flashbacks to what the couple had to do to survive and things connect and tie together nicely. The haunting goes from generic to very specific to who they are and what they went though. And it was genuinely emotional. It worked. Frankly, it’s nice to be surprised by a movie, especially a horror film.
There’s still part of me that wanted a more refugee experience movie but, I suspect, they didn’t see that as a profitable direction. A nice low budget horror film has the potential to earn a lot more money while telling the essentially same tale. So fair enough. I liked this flick… it was different and showed me something I hadn’t seen before.
Score: 82