“All Indian horror movies are silly,” Friend tells me over lunch as I explain why the monster in It Lives Inside was simultaneously picky and easily distracted. Our colleague nods and they both give me the same recommendation of a not-quite-horror-film-horror-film that will do what I want, Bulbbul:
I think I probably saw the trailer for It Lives Inside at approximately the same time as I saw the trailer for Let Me In and haloed the two movies into one excellent movie. That, along with the fab teen horror of Bodies Bodies Bodies and the fab cross cultural coming-of-age of Polite Society predisposed me to set aside some time for this movie.
The basic premise is that two Indian-American girls in LA are attempting to make it through high school and also fight a Pishach/demon thing, which mostly wants to screw with your head and then occasionally gets peckish and then even more occasionally punishes you for trying to get high with your boyfriend. Read: danger level is low. Dad cannot be bothered to take off from a whole day at work low.
To set the stage, it took one friend about forty minutes into the movie to arrive, at which point, I could summarize the action of the plot for him as, “That girl doesn’t want to be Indian and her friend is maybe stuck in a jar somewhere right now?” and he didn’t miss a beat. During the recap at the end he said he has a running theory that the first half hour of every horror film is completely superfluous, to which Friend said, “That movie was an hour too long,” to which I said, “It was only 90 minutes!” to which the guy who came in 40 minutes late said, “Of the hour I saw it was an hour too long.”
“Just because Jordan Peele made a movie about being black in America doesn’t mean everyone gets to do one,” Friend said, to which Friend helpfully asks, “I wonder if the people who made that movie actually watched it?” And I think that’s really all you need to know about the content of the film. The least believable thing about the movie is how often it’s raining in LA. For the amount of moody drizzle, it should’ve really been set in Seattle or Vancouver. The dream sequence scares, which make up most of the second half of the movie are going to turn off anyone like Wife, for whom dream scares destabilize the audience’s relationship between stakes and reality. Learning enough Sanskrit in one night to fight off a demon really puts in perspective how cocky the main character is, but more than that is this scene that really got the two friends who truly and really love horror films, in which–and I’m ruining absolutely nothing by telling you this–if anything it’ll make you want to scroll through this movie til you find the scene–there’s this moment when the main character, in order to lure the Pishach out of the high school where it’s currently trying to kill her overly attached and involved high school teacher (“Is that her… guidance counselor?” Friend confusedly asks of the teacher who has her student’s phone number offering to come to her house in the middle of the night), realizing that they don’t have raw meat for the monster, decide instead to cook a seven course vegetarian meal which seems to take hours, all while there are scenes of the teacher being mauled and harassed and calling on the phone repeatedly. This leads to the monster ultimately showing up and rejecting the meal offering in seconds.
There’s also this moment when it seems like some kid who previously had captured the Pishach had done so only through the ultimately sacrifice of killing himself, which raises some uncomfortable questions about suicide as heroism. Obviously everyone in his community thinks he was mentally ill, but he seems to be doing basically the same thing as that one kid in It: Part Two and that thing from Talk To Me that we alluded to last month. What gives?
Half a Babadook.
