Flasz On Film

The now well-established microgenre of elevated horror has become the perfect playground for filmmakers to both frolic in the sandbox of familiar tropes and to build sandcastles aesthetically themed around ideas relevant to their creators. It is now easier than ever before to set out to make a horror film that openly asks its audience to look past the scares and find an emotionally charged conversation of some description. And as it happens, whenever a freshly blazed trail becomes a new beaten path, it becomes increasingly easier for artists who are perhaps less audacious or inspired to make their way through the dense tropical forest of genre iconography, because what used to be a challenging feat of strength may now be considered accessible to the masses.  

Therefore, just as you will occasionally see Sunday tourists in flip flops making their way uphill hoping to summit what some time ago was considered a peak reserved for experienced climbers – thanks to the simple fact that over the years a lot of effort has been put into building safety features like railings, ladders and rope bridges – you may also find an elevated horror that isn’t anywhere near as elevated as some of the best ones you may have seen in the past. And if you are particularly unlucky, you may also find a double whammy that also happens not to be all that horrific either. Like It Lives Inside.  

Directed and written by Bishal Dutta, It Lives Inside is perhaps a great example of a movie that probably worked way better as an elevator pitch, as its slimmed down synopsis does offer some promise. Imagine a story about a young Indian American girl Samidha (Megan Suri), a teenager struggling to fit in with her high school friends, where she feels like an outsider due to her heritage. Her parents (Neeru Bajwa and Vik Sahay), who had made their way to America to give their child opportunities they never had, bend themselves backwards to pass on their traditions and customs, if only to make sure their daughter would never lose touch with her “old home”, where presumably she still has family.  

One day, Samidha, or Sam as she prefers to be called by her high school peers, bumps into her childhood friend Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), who has been carrying a strange-looking jar covered in mysterious drawings, and as luck would have it, the jar breaks. Soon thereafter, Tamira disappears and whatever lived inside (sic!) the jar – which we can surmise based on seeing Tamira feed the jar raw meat from her blood-soaked backpack – is set free… and comes to haunt Sam’s existence.  

From there, it really doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots and see where the elevation factor of It Lives Inside comes from, or what it points towards. It has to be said that not too often do we get to see elements of Indian culture permeate into the familiar templates of supernatural horror. It is quite frankly undeniable that Dutta’s own immigrant experience must have served as a basis for this movie, which attempts a conversation about cultural assimilation and the anxiety of trying to live up to the expectations of your parents, while also finding some elbow room to express your own identity. And to also remember how that identity is equally shaped by your ancestral heritage and your own environment. All this Bishal Dutta tries to hang onto a rather formulaic narrative framework hoping for the audience at large to connect with those anxieties and live vicariously through Sam’s alienating experience.  

Unfortunately, it does not work at all. And the reason for this is simple: for an elevated supernatural horror to work, it must do something right in order to establish a viable connection with the viewer, either by way of having them relate to Sam as a first-generation American, or as a lead in a horror film. It doesn’t have to be fresh or original. It just needs to be interesting enough to convince the viewer to care. But it isn’t. It Lives Inside might be built upon a potentially compelling premise rooted in exotic mysticism and further elevated by some infrequent instances of visual flair, but upon close inspection it reveals itself as nothing more than a stack of clichés, none of which work in favour of elevating the film’s themes, bolstering its mood or – heavens forbid – generating functional scare tactics.  

It’s just a bland piece of direct-to-Shudder genre fodder that somehow snuck its way into the cinema and it is holding for dear life before its true identity is revealed and it is returned to where it truly belongs – the bottom rungs of the Netflix library where nobody in their right mind would ever venture in search of Friday night entertainment. Its disguise as a fully operational elevated horror only works if you don’t pay too much attention to it and waltz right past it on your way to whatever it is you’re up to this evening, but if you stop for a second, you shall see just how uninspired It Lives Inside is and how absolutely little sense it makes as a work of storytelling rooted in fundamental narrative logic.  

Again, I do say this often that I don’t mind dumb movies if they keep me ensnared in a state of suspension of disbelief, but Bishal Dutta’s movie is not one of such films. Instead of pummeling me unconscious with its jar of flesh-eating nightmares, It Lives Inside bounced right off my forehead and just made me angry enough to focus properly on what this movie is made of and to see that it falls apart like a cheap suit the minute you give it a proper look. It is nothing more than a borefest punctuated with brief moments of visual acuity, none of which are lasting or potent enough to counteract the film’s fundamental flaws, let alone offset its utterly terrible and downright offensively braindead resolution. It just goes to show that not everyone can just walk right off the street and make a competent elevated horror movie. Having a cool idea for a central metaphor isn’t enough and a few cool visuals aren’t enough of a smoke screen to excuse ninety minutes of derivative and mind-numbingly braindead storytelling. Avoid at all costs.