His House (2020)

A power-house debut from Remi Weekes, deftly balancing social commentary with old school horror (and for once, without zombies).

The movie pulls you inside the life of a Sudanese refugee couple assigned to an apartment in London after a harrowing escape via boat from their home country. In addition to the nightmare of their experience, they’ve got a potential poltergeist.

Movies often face-plant while struggle to convey what is real, a dream, a backstory, or something else. "His House" weaves these shifts expertly. And you will not see the twist coming in the last act.

Here's hoping Remi Weekes joins Ari Aster and Robbert Eggers, bringing horror to a new level of intellectual freakiness.

A glimpse of the horrors faced by refugees escaping war-torn countries for a better life in Britain is provocatively probed in this stylish supernatural horror film from talented writer-director Remi Weekes. <a href="https://www.top10films.co.uk/67374-review-his-house-a-smart-chilling-contemporary-horror/">**His House**</a> unexpectedly blends the anxiety, confusion and alienation felt by a pair of asylum seekers from South Sudan with a nightmarish malevolence born from dark magic and folklore. [_Read my full review on <a href="https://www.top10films.co.uk/67374-review-his-house-a-smart-chilling-contemporary-horror/">Top 10 Films</a>_].

When "Bol" (Sope Dirisu) and his wife "Rial" (Wunmi Mosaku) arrive in the UK after fleeing their war-torn home in South Sudan, they are given leave to remain whilst their case is further investigated, and housed in an ordinary - if a bit run down - housing estate. Helped by their case worker "Mark" (Matt Smith) they are given the basic essentials to get by, but as their stay becomes more extended they struggle to fit into a community that is at best disinterested, at worst a bit hostile - all whilst they start to believe that their new home is possessed! Things quite literally start going bump in the night and the couple begin to wonder if this has something to do with their ancestors, or perhaps the spirits of the folks they left behind to face the uncertainty. It's those last scenarios that we see expressed through dreams and flashbacks and that give us a clue as to just what horrors they escaped. Question is, though: are there now even greater horrors here for them now? At times this can be quite a compelling look at the psychology of people caught between two stools. Not fitting where they now are, not fitting where they once were. The cultural challenges they face now, though, aren't really developed and I found the characterisation of the ultra-tolerant "Mark" a little hard to believe, especially as the hunt for their ethereal nemesis starts to manifest itself in ways that become a little too surreal. Indeed, that's maybe the problem with this. It's trying to combine social and political points, but there's nowhere near enough punch from the dialogue and any message is bogged down in a confused hybrid of their supernatural experiences and the reality of their new British life. It can't have had much of a budget but that needn't have mattered had director Remi Weekes focussed more on keeping the story tight and on developing the characters a little more. It invites us to sympathise based on what he presumes are our own moral standards rather than present us with anything or anybody that's especially interesting. As ever, Smith completely underwhelms and though Mosaku offers us some emotional oomph, the rest of this is disappointingly unremarkable.

*His House* takes one of haunted-house cinema’s oldest practical problems, “why don’t they just leave?”, and gives it a particularly nasty answer: because leaving might get you deported.

Bol and Rial have escaped South Sudan, survived a lethal crossing and been deposited by the British asylum system into a decaying house they are required to inhabit. Remi Weekes makes that bureaucracy part of the haunting. The building is not simply unpleasant. It is a place they have been told to be grateful for, while every condition of their new life reminds them that their welcome remains provisional.

Then the walls start making noises.

What *His House* does particularly well is make the supernatural feel attached to the couple rather than the property. Watery footprints, figures inside the walls and an excellent sequence involving a light switch gradually suggest that this is not an English ghost patiently waiting for new tenants. Something has crossed the water with them.

That matters because Bol and Rial respond to displacement very differently. Bol tries desperately to become what Britain appears to require, changing his clothes, destroying possessions and insisting this is now home. Rial is much less interested in pretending that a new postcode can amputate a previous life. Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù and Wunmi Mosaku make that disagreement feel painfully domestic before the film reveals just how much guilt sits underneath it.

And that revelation is the clever bit. The horror is not simply trauma rendered as spooky wallpaper. The apeth has a cultural and moral logic, and the film eventually forces us to reconsider exactly what Bol and Rial survived, what they did to survive it, and whether survival itself settles anything.

Is it folk horror? Not comfortably. The landscape is wrong for the traditional model and the folklore has arrived with displaced people rather than emerging from the land beneath their feet. But perhaps that is the more interesting proposition: what happens to folk horror when the folk have been forced to move?

Whatever cupboard we file it in, *His House* is concise, frightening and unusually good at making a haunted home feel like both refuge and trap.

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Reviewed by FolknHell, the folk horror film podcast · folknhell com

Hear the full FolknHell podcast discussion of His House: folknhell com/his-house-review along with our other reviews, transcripts and episodes.