‘His House’ Review: Presenting Real Life as the Truest Horror
Remi Weekes’ debut feature intricately uses the horror genre to explore trauma.
In an interview with No Film School, writer/director Remi Weekes recollects that “Growing up in London as a person of color, a conversation we had in our community was of assimilation, and how much of yourself do you give up or let go to give in.” This tension of identity is among the most important themes explored in His House, the director’s debut feature. The 2020 film follows two Sudanese refugees, Bol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) navigating their new environment in the United Kingdom. Once in this unfamiliar landscape, they are reminded from the beginning that their ability to seek asylum is conditional. To keep their home, they must sign off on a myriad of restrictions. They are not allowed to work and must live off of a meager allowance. They are expected to adapt to their environment and assimilate, as Weekes notes. All of these are accurate representations of the material realities faced by refugees in the U.K. Weekes carefully brings to screen the physical and emotional experiences of asylum seekers, exploring simultaneously the quiet traumas of forced migration within everyday life, and the volatile pain felt internally as a result of haunting memories.
The story being located within the genre of horror sheds a unique light onto scenes that in most other contexts would be mundane. The couple going through the steps of finding a home, Rial going to a doctor, or Bol shopping for new clothes and spending time at a bar are all through the lens of tense camerawork and a soundtrack that brings unease to the surface. The unease that is attached to their new world within the U.K. points to the complex politics of assimilation this film is invested in making legible to viewers. Between Bol and Rial, conflicts arise consistently over the way that their culture must fade in order to be “one of the good ones.” Rial in many moments is resistant to the actions taken to assimilate, expressing discomfort when Bol serves dinner on a table with silverware rather than on the floor eating with their hands. Rial however experiences the consequences of not embodying the role of an assimilated migrant. While lost and looking for directions, she seeks help from a group of young Black British boys who ridicule her accent upon helping her, yelling “Go back to Africa!” as she walks away. This scene, in particular, stands out in the way it complicates the relationship between race and national identity to highlight the isolating experiences faced by refugees.
The isolation felt in their new home informs the most important locus of conflict within the film, which is the home that they are sent to live in. Within the walls of their run-down home, Bol and Rial are made to confront the traumas they carry from their migration to the U.K. This drives Bol and Rial to take dramatic action, breaking through the walls as memories haunt them through impressive visual effects that make the emotions they grapple with tangible. Their struggle against these memories and traumas bring them to various places from their past, from their old home to the harsh seas they faced to reach Europe. These scenes intensify more and more as the film progresses, enveloping a viewer in the pain that unravels for the couple through astonishing performances from Dirisu and Mosaku that never present these difficult memories and the hurt that arises from them as being the result of any irrational or external madness that is almost to be expected from a horror. These performances and the film as a whole carefully adds to a public discourse surrounding asylum seekers, in this case from the conflicts in Sudan, that centers on the complicated and widely faced experiences of traumatic memory and coerced assimilation. Rial states within the film “We have seen what man can do, do you think I fear what bumps in the night?” This quote exists almost as a microcosm of the way horror is used to tell this story. Where much of the horror genre hinges on fears of the unknown, His House asks how the violence of war and xenophobia manifest within the body and the “home,” making space for the genre to deal not only in hypotheticals, but lived experience.
His House is available to be streamed on Netflix.
