Flasz On Film

When you listen to some bands, you can hear they are singing their hearts out. They may not be the best at playing their instruments and their songs may not be too sophisticated, but you know their music is somehow inspired. That it has a purpose going beyond the obvious ambition to be a successful act. That it has a soul. 

Conversely, you can also probably think of bands that sound great, are technically virtuosic and their material is structurally out there… but it is still somehow empty. Cough, Dream Theater, cough. Their chord progressions are all perfectly harmonious and well composed. Their solos are technically flashy, competent, awash in advanced techniques. But none of them ever leave you in tears. They sound like well-orchestrated and executed products assembled with mathematical precision of an educated master craftsman. 

The same logic applies to films in my humble opinion in that you can sometimes tell the difference between a movie that has a heartbeat, and a cinematic tin man who’s built to function like a movie, but whose heart is sadly missing. Unfortunately, The Inhabitant is one such tin man. Or better yet, it’s a cinematic T-800 (or T-101 as per the original The Terminator) which looks like a human, bleeds like a human… but it doesn’t feel or think like a human. And if you batter it hard enough, you will see that underneath its seemingly lifelike flesh it hides an endoskeleton made of cold metal… and that its brain is nothing but a collection of transistors made of silicon and copper.  

However, it looks just fine on first glance. The Inhabitant that is. Not T-800. Well, T-800 looks fine on first glance, too. But that’s because Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime looked like a Greek god. But that’s neither here nor there. 

Where was I? 

Ah, yes. The Inhabitant.  

So, the movie behaves like a perfectly palatable Dream Theater song.  

‘Jakub, please. Pull yourself together and stick to one metaphor…’ 

‘No! You’re not my real mom. You’re just a voice in my head.’ 

Ironically, this is somehow relevant to the movie itself, which anchors its narrative around the real-life story of Lizzie Borden, a woman who one day hacked her family to pieces with an axe. However, who we do follow is not Lizzie Borden but her descendant a bunch of generations later. Her name is Tara (Odessa A’zion) and she’s about to finish high school, but her existence is troubled by progressively more oppressive visions and nightmares invading her headspace – visions of violence and horror. What is more, Tara’s parents (Leslie Bibb and Dermot Mulroney) grow concerned she might be showing early signs of schizophrenia that runs in the family. Therefore, it is for Tara to go on a journey of self-discovery and figure out if she is in fact suffering from a debilitating mental illness in need of urgent attention and treatment, or if she is indeed possessed by a malevolent spirit who arbitrarily chose to stick to her family tree. And that’s all against the backdrop of a series of unexplained disappearances and violent murders (axe murders) happening in the neighbourhood.  

Now, in theory, The Inhabitant has everything a modern “elevated horor” requires to succeed on its own terms. It’s a narrative rooted in genre familiarity that uses the vocabulary of a gothic horror story with requisite confidence. It also holds a promise of a thematic false bottom where its narrative template would find connection to fundamental elements of the human condition or an issue of societal relevance. It’s a piece reliant on mood, dread and skillful generation of suspense with the use of classic cinematic techniques. And yet, it somehow does not work as intended. It walks like a duck. It quacks like one… but it’s not a duck. It’s a T-800. Or a Dream Theater song.  

You pick one.  

What I’m desperately trying to articulate is that The Inhabitant is one of those movies that happens to be competent and confident, but equally not at all compelling. It plays the right notes in the right order. Its final solo is a display of sweep-picked mixolydian arpeggios building up to a climax of double-tapping against a descending sequence of backdoor two-five-ones and then modulating by a third to deliver its final oomph. Which is all great. All perfect. All by the book. Almost too great. Too perfect. Too by the book.  

That’s my main gripe with this movie. It’s not that it’s poorly cobbled together. In fact, it is just the opposite. Jerren Lauder’s camera work is exactly what you’d expect from a mid-budget studio film director. The writing doesn’t have any major flaws and it plods along from A to B without much ado. The performances are also appropriate for the material. The same goes for jump scares and brief flashes of violence, which are all competently abrupt and effective. This movie is exactly what you’d expect it to be, so much that you could perhaps begin suspecting it may have been concocted by a large language model advanced enough to almost pass the Turing test.  

Almost. But not quite.  

Being too competent and too watertight is the real issue here. It raises all sorts of red flags in the human brain because our minds are just not accustomed to dealing with machine-derived lifelike perfection and we reject it on principle, thus manifesting the uncanny valley effect. We can tell when something has a heartbeat and a soul, and it freaks us out when we find something that looks like it should have a pulse but doesn’t.  

That’s where I am with The Inhabitant. It’s a competently engineered tin man that looks and talks like a movie that could move me internally, but it can’t. Because it’s just a doll. And I can’t have a relationship with a doll, can I? Therefore, I am sad to report that I got bupkis out of the experience of watching this movie despite the fact a lot of its constituent parts are worthy of praise in isolation. You simply cannot overlook Odessa A’zion’s performance as Tara, or Leslie Bibb’s “big moment” towards the end. You probably wouldn’t walk past how Jerren Lauder manufactures some of the film’s major scares and how he uses brief flashes of violence to momentarily upset the viewer. These aspects are all true and they all hold water on their own. But they don’t gel together into something that looks as though it was inspired in any meaningful way.  

As I said, it’s not enough to know all the scales and have the technical toolkit to write and perform a sophisticated song. A musician must have something to say if they want me to respond to their work on an emotional level. The same goes for movies and I believe The Inhabitant wants me to engage with its subject matter and emerge with a handful of stirring thoughts relating to the frightfulness of a mental illness that can creep up on you and warp your perception of reality without your say-so. Sadly, it can’t because it is, after all, a tin man. A T-800. A Dream Theater song.