‘It Lives Inside’ Movie Review: Culturally Specific Horror Film Still Feels Familiar
Photo from NEON
From Jeremy Kibler
Supernatural horror breaks new ground in terms of cultural representation with It Lives Inside, the feature debut from writer-director Bishal Dutta. The film (based on Dutta’s story with Ashish Mehta) is certainly a personal story told from a fresh perspective, but besides a few exceptions, it’s in the standard plotting and scares that make this chiller come across a little less special and a bit more rote.
Megan Suri plays Samidha, an Indian-American girl who has distanced herself from her cultural background. Sniffing her clothes before she gets to school, she just wants to fit in and would rather go by “Sam,” even at home in the suburbs with her immigrant mother Poorna (Neeru Bajwa) and father Inesh (Vik Sahay), who’s looser with the customs. At school, Sam has stopped associating herself with an old friend, Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), who starts showing up to class looking withdrawn and clutching to a glass jar. When Tamira approaches Sam, you better believe that jar falls to the ground, breaking and unleashing the evil spirit that’s living inside. The demon, however, is a “Pishach,” a flesh-eating demon in Hindu and Buddhist mythology that must be trapped in another vessel. Once Sam believes the Pishach is real, how can she stop it?
There have been so many recent horror films of the same “Metaphor/Literal Monster” ilk (or it just feels that way) that any upcoming releases really have to bring it. If trauma (or however Jamie Lee Curtis pronounces it) was the real darkness dweller in Rob Savage’s The Boogeyman, It Lives Inside at least gives that tired chestnut a break. In a cautionary-tale sort of way about never forgetting where you come from, this demon is actually integral to the characters’ religion. Without that specificity, this would just be another movie about a demonic presence. But even so, it still feels like another movie about a demonic presence, as skilled and nicely moody as it can be.
Megan Suri (Missing and Netflix’s Never Have I Ever) makes for an expressive and emotionally available heroine as Samidha. Her story about rejecting her heritage and claiming her identity is inherently compelling. In theory, adding a demon from Hindu mythology to that coming-of-age material is ripe with promise, but the been-there-seen-that horror elements actually underserve the narrative, and that’s frustrating.
Aided by Wesley Hughes’ unsettling, string-laden score, director Dutta does devise a couple of effective horror set-pieces. Most startling of all is a moment on swing set where the monster remains invisible but its gnarly carnage does not. Betty Gabriel, bringing compassion and understanding as Sam’s very supportive teacher Joyce, also gets one of the film’s creepier moments involving a timed heat lamp in the school bathroom, until her character increasingly makes one forehead-smacking decision after another (yeah, let’s hide inside a tight locker). Other scare sequences, like a nightmare with a contorting body, are too familiar to be as frightening as they should be. Also, does the Pishach thrive on precipitation, or is it just always raining in this town when the demon strikes?
When it comes time to give us a good look at the mean monster in plain sight, the film grows less effective and kind of silly, making us long for the earlier moments when the monster’s presence was merely suggested. The final act disappointingly becomes a basement battle between a teenage girl and a guy in a Godzilla/Predator suit. The tactile nature of the practical effects is admirable over CGI, but the air of dread has officially deflated. It Lives Inside means well thematically, but as a horror movie, it’s too tepid in execution to set itself apart or raise the hair on one’s arm.
Rating: 2.5/5
It Lives Inside hits theaters on September 22, 2023.
