‘His House’ Is A Devastating Movie About The Horrors Of Assimilation For Immigrants

There are moments in His House so viscerally painful I had to fight the urge to turn away. A scene in a public clinic, for instance, where well-meaning Dr. Hayes (Emily Taaffe), just making small talk while she takes blood pressure and draws blood, asks about her patient Rial’s (Wunmi Mosaku) daughter. She probably knows Rial is a refugee from the genocidal cleansing of South Sudan, but she doesn’t know that Rial’s daughter Nyagak (Malaika Wakoli-Abigaba) has died on the journey north. Remi Weekes, making a notable debut as writer/director of His House, centers the doctor and Rial in tension with one another. Rial takes her ministrations stoically. She’s just suffered some racial humiliation on her way to the clinic and some of that has seeped into this moment, it seems, but there’s more. Dr. Hayes compliments Rial on her tribal tattoos and Rial, wearily, tells her that she gave herself the marks of a rival tribe after coming home one day to find her family butchered. She bears the marks of both sides of the conflict. She says: “I survived by belonging nowhere.” She’s being asked to again here in a London slum where immigration has essentially imprisoned them with bans on working, moving, failing to check in, anything more than just existing. She tells the doctor “(w)e lost her… when we crossed the sea”. She’s lost more than that.

Rial’s husband Bol (Sope Dirisu) has nightmares every night and sometimes those nightmares seep into the waking hours. He distracts himself by going to the grocery, going to the pub and pretending he belongs. In a brilliant sequence, he goes into a department store where we see him being watched (as Black people are watched while shopping), and choosing a new outfit based on a wall-sized mural depicting a very white dad with his exaggeratedly-white family. In its framing of a hero being watched, unnoticed by the hero, it reminds of Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In his subtle approach to racial politics, Weekes announces himself as a vital voice for this cultural flex point. Bol doesn’t like to be at home because a witch lives there now that has followed them from Sudan. Rial thinks it’s a “night witch,” an avatar of their guilt over surviving when everyone they love, and everything they’ve loved of their home, is gone now, perverted into something awful and strange. The appearance of this thing in their state-sponsored hovel is proof for Rial that her husband has done things for which they need to atone. We find out what those things are later and, almost at the end, the film transforms into a parable of truth and reconciliation. 

His House is about assimilation for displaced nationalities: the creation story for every diaspora here in the tale of our parents who gave up everything, every thing, to make a journey across the ocean in the pursuit of something as ephemeral as a dream for a better life for themselves and their children. But then the children become the children of their adopted culture and no longer their own; but then they find themselves not only strangers in a strange land but no longer accepted by the culture they left behind. You can never go home again, it’s true, because home is gone and “there’s a great beast” in the new one. Rial tells their British caseworker Mark (Matt Smith) that there are holes in their walls now because her husband has been chasing this beast all night with a hammer. “This is what they want, they want to see us crazy” she says, because it distracts them from their own privileged lives. His House is as keenly observed and sharply-written film about the immigrant experience as anything that I’ve ever seen: the sequel to Elia Kazan’s America America that discovers that the New World is also a horror story, just with a different cast and circumstances. The great question of the film is what is the nature of the “beast” haunting Rial and Bol and Weekes reveals it as a combination of something from within and indeed all the things from without. 

Late in the game, Rial stares into Bol’s eyes as he’s transfixed by visions of Nyagak, who has undergone a sea change in his imagination into something chthonic and horrible. She runs from their house into a past where her family is still alive if only long enough for a tearful reunion and an expression of love and grief. Rial is finding the closure that Bol is unable to, because closure for them is in the pain they left behind, not the pain waiting for them up ahead. His House deals with suicide among immigrants during the impossible period of assimilation where you look different, you don’t speak the language well, you smell different, you eat strange things, and you’re demonized for taking resources from the native population. It deals with the uncanniness of a world in constant danger of falling apart by telling its story while straddling the line between horror fantasy and stark realism. Japanese master Kenji Mizoguchi made films like this: about men measuring themselves by one standard and women getting caught in the dreadful backwash of their misplaced attentions. His House is ridiculously good, an embarrassment of thought and execution. If that weren’t enough, it’s also one of the scariest movies in a year full of superlative frights.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Watch His House on Netflix