It Lives Inside - Review

It Lives Inside opens in theaters September 22.

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The cultural specifics of It Lives Inside ought to make it stand out in the Hollywood horror landscape. Instead, these ideas not only find themselves tacked on to a tensionless teen thriller, they also take overly simplistic forms. In telling the story of two Indian American high schoolers – Samidha or “Sam” (Megan Suri) and her troubled former best friend Tamira (Mohana Krishnan) – whose attempts to assimilate are accompanied by an invisible demon, It Lives Inside crafts a metaphor that's left feeling haphazard, if not outright insulting, by its execution. 

In keeping with the bicultural characters, writer-director Bishal Dutta attempts to combine a number of Indian and American cinematic influences, but his debut feature ends up with a series of rote images and concepts that hardly mesh. The opening scenes, which feature charred and mangled bodies in a suburban house awash in red light, are about the only time It Lives Inside manages to be truly intriguing, before embarking on a journey through overly familiar tropes. At times, it feels like a lesson in Indian Americanness 101, with characters like Sam introduced through the frequent routine of shaving her body hair and sheepishly leaving her lunch behind when she leaves for school, presumably to avoid being mocked by her white peers. These experiences are true to life, but they never factor into the film in any meaningful way, since we seldom witness Sam interact with anyone who isn’t a major character.

It can’t help but play like a parody of other recent South Asian American movies and shows shouldering the responsibility of encapsulating a vast and varied cultural experience (like Netflix’s Never Have I Ever, in which Suri also appears). These experiences are also presented in segmented fashion; sometimes, scenes are broken up by fades or cuts to black, rather than organic or rhythmic transitions, deflating what little tension the movie has.

After hinting at Sam’s scuffles with her immigrant mother, Poorna (Neeru Bajwa) – whose face is frozen into a one-dimensional scowl, and who insists on only speaking Hindi – the plot kicks into motion by introducing the deeply disturbed Tamira, who behaves strangely, walks around with a jar filled with black smoke, and is hard to take seriously. This is hardly Krishnan’s fault. She seems to perform the character as written: a girl with idiosyncratic tics, and messy hair obscuring her face. Dutta practically models her off the Bollywood bhootni, or female ghost, a worn-out archetype whose defining characteristics are her Ringu-like locks and an empty, tilted-forward gaze. (Think the “Kubrick stare” but without intensity or meaning.) Everything about Tamira feels like a cinematic misappropriation. There’s nothing truly disquieting about a character whose troubles ought to be invisible or withheld, lingering just beneath the surface, but whose every word and gesture tries extra hard to project a peculiarity ripe for bullying, à la Carrie (albeit without the depth or nuance to give her story any emotional allure). Once again, it veers awfully close to parody.

When Tamira mysteriously disappears, it’s up to Sam to put the pieces together, using clues from a strange diary she’d been carrying around. With the help of her teacher, Joyce (Betty Gabriel) and her classmate/crush Russ (Gage Marsh), Sam soon uncovers an unseen demonic presence that eats raw meat and must be trapped within a container – whether it’s an inanimate object or a human being. And so begins their shopwarn quest, from the research Sam, Joyce, and Russ perform – Google searches? You bet. Haunted house visits? Those too – to the verbose explanations of what this demon embodies. On one hand, the characters discuss some vague explanation about this presence feeding on isolation and self-loathing (the real demon, you see, is depression), but on the other, what the filmmakers either don’t recognize or don’t fully confront is the lens through which this metaphorror (to borrow a phrase coined by critic Charles Bramesco) is introduced.

It’s speculated that the demon in question may have tormented several members of the local Indian American community, having apparently followed an immigrant family from the subcontinent. (One wonders if it had to wait in the immigration queue at JFK.) Between this setup, and the constant hammering home that Sam wears her heritage like a heavy stone around her neck – her race is a burden she can’t make invisible, no matter how hard she tries – it becomes difficult to avoid the notion that this demon represents Indianness itself, in a manner with which the movie doesn’t fully reckon.

It becomes difficult to avoid the notion that this demon represents Indianness itself, in a manner with which the movie doesn't fully reckon.

This movie’s melting pot approach comes to an awkward boil when it turns out that defeating the demon might require specific Hindu cultural rituals and mantras, even though these end up being deployed in the exact same manner as Christian rituals in The Exorcist. The problems lie not in any one idea, but in their collective execution. Where Indian American horror contemporary Evil Eye folded its genre hallmarks into a deeply personal story – one that also rooted its fears in Hindu concepts, and the idea of what people try to escape or leave behind when they emigrate – It Lives Inside bites off far more than it can chew in terms of symbolic meaning. It hopscotches between clues and discoveries that have specific Hindu connotations, but are seldom the focus for long enough to matter; plenty is depicted, but little is explored. Were it not for Suri’s sincerity and intensity, it would feel like little more than a series of Instagram graphics explaining the basics of Hinduism to an audience that's never heard of Diwali.

Then of course, there is the difficult question of who exactly this bit of “representation” actually represents. In some respects, the film is carelessly reflective of past and present ills within Indian society. There’s a lack of specificity to the characters and their cultural background that feels tepid and hesitant, but their rituals, and the surnames of their friends and neighbors (their own family name isn’t mentioned) feature all the signifiers of an “upper” caste Brahmin community, bolstered by the fact their household is vegetarian, another cultural hallmark of Brahminism. This isn’t a value-neutral concept, especially in the context of a demon whose vicious properties include eating meat – an act associated, by people of “upper” castes, with “lower” caste impurity.

Charitably, this ugly underlying subtext is inadvertent, but it speaks to the lack of thought and consideration put into the movie’s symbols and optics. It also raises the question of whether the depiction of “upper” caste Hindu rituals and chants can be wielded like weapons – or whether actual weapons straight out of Hindu epics can appear on screen, as they seem to randomly do here – sans the modern association of Hinduism with Hindutva, the growing right-wing political movement in India, the United States, and elsewhere. It’s not unlike Christian Evangelicalism’s bizarre attempts to infiltrate cinema (God’s Not Dead and the like), a religious context that does not and cannot exist independently of its overwhelming political influence.

Then again, if one chose to brush aside this blinkered cultural approach, maybe it wouldn’t matter. There’s little in It Lives Inside that feels worth the trouble in the first place, between its cartoonish movie monster – when the demon is finally revealed, it’s a miracle the Power Rangers don’t show up to dropkick it – and its near-total lack of visual and narrative tension. Barring a 10-minute stretch near the end, in which Gabriel gets to luxuriate in scream queen material, little in the movie feels accentuated by the use of light, shadow, or sound, and much of its brutality is hidden by the boundaries of the screen. For most of its 99 minutes, It Lives Inside is completely flavorless.