His House brings horror movies closer to the reality of refugees in Europe
Disclaimer: This is the translation of an article published at TAB UOL.
Since 2017, cinema critics have adopted a new term to address certain recent horror movies. “Post horror” is thus an attempt to describe the work of a new wave of directors and screenwriters who have been proposing tense and dramatic stories, though they do not resort to supernatural or magical elements to scare the audiences. In the case of titles such as “It Comes At Night”, “Get Out” or “The Babadook,” even though we might face supernatural presences, which are invisible or embodied as a monster, this magical element is much more effective as a metaphor about some real and contemporary issue.
Back in the day, blood-soaked franchises were led by male murderers such as Jason, Michael Myers or Freddie Krueger. Now, on the other hand, directors such as Jordan Peele, Ari Aster and Jennifer Kent might resort to some of the classic elements of the genre to build their movies’ argument, but real issues like racism, sexism, the challenges of motherhood and family living, as well as toxic relationships or even venereal diseases. These are some of the topics addressed in titles like “Us”, “Hereditary”, “Midsommar” and “It Follows”, for instance. Peele, on his part, became one of the recent Hollywood sweethearts after using the horror genre to approach racial issues — being it through original films or remakes like “Candyman”. What’s more, his acclaimed contribution in the series “Lovecraft Country” is posed to subvert the writer’s racism through a narrative that is led by a young black man who travels in a segregated United States in the 1950s.
More recently, Netflix added to its catalogue the movie “His House”, by the debutant director Remi Weekes. The film is based on a story written by Felicity Evans and Tony Venables and it portrays the trajectory of a Sudaneese refugee couple who found shelter in England. Featuring the actors Wunmi Mosaku, Sope Dirisu and Matt Smith, “His House” has in its first minutes an ambience that fails to convince the audience they are watching a horror movie: the scenes portray the raw reality of African countries in armed conflict, being thus followed by the nightmarish sequence of an attempt to take refuge in Europe through an overloaded boat that, inevitably, is caught on an accident in which the couple Bol and Rial lose their daughter. Unfortunately, scenes such as these are not in the collective imagination due to fictional works: in fact they are based on actual events, such as the famous photo titled “The Death of Alan Kurdi.”
Daylight Horror
As if tragedy wasn’t enough, destiny takes the couple to a refugee shelter where they wait for an undetermined time until they are relocated to social housing in the suburbs of London. If in the traditional horror movies we would probably see a dark ambience that would make justice to the image of a haunted house, here the director shows under the incandescent light the faces of those who wait, in line, for a chance to carry on or, ultimately, those who have unsuccessfully attempted to take their own life.
Just like in the emblematic scene of “Us” in which the family faces their doubles and try to convince them not to kill them, here we see Bol and Riel performing that what they believe their interviewers expect from well-behaved people — to the point that Bol stresses in his speech that they are indeed good people. The system there is embodied through agents that enjoy their bits of contextual authority to exert it against vulnerable persons, and this is what makes the scene as uneasy or even more than what we are going to see later, when the couple starts to experience hellish hallucinations.
It’s hard to separate the metaphor from what, in fact, happens in the story of “His House”. At a certain moment, Riel tells a tale of his tribe about a burglar who stole from all the villagers to become rich. However, at one point, this criminal steals from a sorcerer, who punishes him for that. We are thus suffocated with a sequence of nightmares that address very practical and tangible issues — such as the grief for their dead child, the loneliness of living in an unknown place and the very fact of inhabiting a decrepit house.
Right in the first days they were relocated to this new home, Bol decided to take a stroll in the neighborhood and ended up being invited to watch a football game in a pub. There, he tries to blend with the locals by singing songs and cheering for teams that, in principle, have nothing to do with his own personal history and preferences. Bol also begins to dress in a way more similar to the English style and, when he comes back home, he refuses to eat using his hands, as the couple traditionally would do. He starts to use cutlery and also demands that Riel talk in English with him. Later on, Bol starts to believe they need to burn all the personal items they brought from home, as if they were rather cursed. Riel gets infuriated, after all, her husband wasn’t allowing her to keep anything that reminded them of their daughter.
In the case of Riel though, she tries to find means to honor her origins and the memory of her daughter, while still trying to adapt to this new reality. Among the most frequent criticisms pointed against immigrants is precisely the fact that some prefer to keep their habits and rites, even though they no longer live in their homeland. This gets much more clear when a social worker played by Smith ironizes Riel’s clothes, saying that she was dressed in sheets. Another example comes when Riel is lost in the labyrinthic blocks of her neighborhood and asks for help to some black teenagres, in the hope of being welcomed by them. However, they make fun of her vulnerability (being lost and being an immigrant), offend her with racist slurrs and demand that she gets back to Africa, since England is for the English. No news when it comes to the results of Brexit and when, by the time of the polls, immigrants and people with non-European ascendance were interpelled in the streets with similar kinds of aggression.
Searching Home
It is terrible to think that, even after surviving armed conflicts and to a very risky trip in the ocean, the Sudanese couple still needs to deal with ghosts, bureaucracy of the social assistance system as well as the racism in Britain. The question that begs is thus: is there any place on Earth that is not inhospitable for these people? If in their own home they are marked to become statistics, and if out there they are considered alien and annoying (think about the racism suffered by Haitian refugees living in Brazil, for instance), then what else is there for these people?
By the end of the movie, the couple absorbs all hauntings and terrors of their new European life by facing supernatural creatures and making an effort to refurbish their new home, after all, they were still in a “probationary” period in which their behavior would still be fiscalized. Still, in spite of all attempts, Bol and Riel’s home is still inhabited by the ghost of people who they left behind, who died in the war or while trying to take refuge from it. The message that stays is, therefore, that even if we are away from our home, we always carry with us our own story, our roots and tragedies. Trying to abdicate our origins may seem to be the easiest path, but, in fact, it is never the choice that will bring peace to our own souls and to those who are carried with us, through our memories. Perhaps the answer is to live with these ghosts and play the game of the system, which is, after all, the least of all possible evils.
Did you like the post? What about you Buy me a Coffee? :)
