Title: It Lives Inside
Describe This Movie In One Big Trouble In Little Chinaย Quote:
JACK BURTON:ย When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if you’ve paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol’ Jack Burton always says at a time like that: “Have ya paid your dues, Jack?” “Yessir, the check is in the mail.”
Brief Plot Synopsis:ย Don’t tell Grover, but there really is a monster at the end of this book.
Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film:ย 3 Captain Walkers out of 5.
Tagline:ย “ร ยคยชร ยคยฟร ยคยถร ยคยพร ยคย”
Better Tagline:ย “That’s Sanskrit for Pishacha, which is both a flesh-eating demon and a spoiler.”
Not So Brief Plot Synopsis:ย Samidah (Megan Suri) โ or “Sam,” as she likes to be called โ isn’t exactly ashamedย of her East Indian background. But she’d rather hit the “kick back” at the park with the cute high school guy instead of attending the boring old Durga Pujaย party her mom’s throwing. Well, as the cast of Gleeย once said, you can’t always get what you want. Especially after Sam’s former best friend Tamira (Mohana Krishnan) disappeared after freaking everyone at school out by carrying around a jar and muttering ominously about … things.
“Critical” Analysis:ย Hollywood’s gotten better, but still has a long way to go in acknowledging non-Western horror beyond the occasional bone thrown to (usually) Caucasian heroes doing battle with foreign nemeses (see also: every action movie from the 1990s).
Enter writer/director Bishal Dutta, whose It Lives Insideย is a pleasant (maybe not the best word) amalgam of folkloric horror and cultural disconnect, with an added schmear of period genre homage.
Sam’s discomfort at her outsider status among her classmates (It Lives Inside was shot in Vancouver, which might explain why the high school bacchanal is called a “kickback” instead of a “kegger”) is apparent early on. She’s shown shaving her arms during the opening credits, which I admittedly did not know was A Thing. And her distancing herself from her family’s traditions and Tamira leads to friction between her and her mom Poorna (Neeru Bajwa).
It’s therefore satisfying that Dutta leverages this into his story. Is it obvious that Sam will have to embrace her heritage in order to combat the entity (a demon that may have pursued the unfortunate neighboring Chowdhary family to Canada)? It’s not the most subtle approach: the self-perceived “other” fighting the literal Other with the help of ancestral lore, but it gives mom and daughter a chance to bond.
To his credit, Dutta generates some decent scares. Then again, when your monster is invisible the majority of the time and likes to rend the flesh from its victims, that isn’t too difficult. Even when someone manages to corral it (in a “vessel” of unspecified dimensions or composition), carting the thing around too long appears to gradually turn the bearer into Samara from The Ring.
Dutta cites his love for A Nightmare on Elm Streetย as an inspiration, and it shows. It Lives Insideย also pulls from Psycho, The Boogeyman, and โ in a weird way โ Monster Squad.ย The big difference is Dutta’s straight horror approach. There aren’t any quips or pithy one-liners from the Pishach, which is simply a hungry hungry murder machine.
The cultural aspect, and the themes of isolation among liminal societies, are what elevate It Lives Insideย from fairly standard genre fare. The beats are familiar, but Dutta’s affection for horror and Suri’s acting chops make this worth a visit.
It Lives Inside is in theaters today.
This article appears in Jan 1 โ Dec 31, 2023.
