I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (Osgood Perkins, 2016)

[joshua]

I have a feeling you folks will not like it as much, but Perkin's other movie I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (his newest) is on Netflix. It is branded as a Netflix Original. Since I'm a big fan of Shirley Jackson's writings, the movie was right up my alley. It really gets Jackson's general mindset, the interior life of her female characters and the psychology of an isolated house. Pretty Thing is also a very slow burn that judges its pace just right. It and Blackcoat have been rather pleasant surprises for me which have broken up a run of buzzed-about newer horror films that, like The Void or Cure for Wellness, really rubbed me the wrong way.

[Mr Sausage]

I watched I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (great title, much better than the two attached to Perkins' previous film), and while I didn't like it as much due to the material being a bit thinner, the technical prowess and confidence of The Blackcoat's Daughter was just as present. It's the sheer patience of that style that impresses me; how many horror movies are willing to be that slow, to spend so much time just making sure the tiniest things--sometimes only the tiniest things--carry the maximum weight of tension and fright? It's so quiet and minimal, indeed, that The Blackcoat's Daughter looks positively roaring in comparison. An extremely effective haunted house movie, one probably too elliptical (what do we really find out at the conclusion?), but worthy nonetheless, and more interesting than movies like The Conjuring.

I'm really excited to see what Perkins does next.

[DarkImbecile]

While I agree with Mr Sausage that this isn't quite as innovative and substantial as The Blackcoat's Daughter, this — the last of Perkins' three features I've caught up with — really cemented for me that he's among the best directors actively working in horror. His ability to jump between different subgenres and somehow deliver a top-tier example of each one, maintaining a distinctive personal style without just spinning off new versions of the same scares and camera tricks in each film (unlike, say, James Wan, to build off of Sausage's comparison above) is very impressive, and his writing — here echoing in the voiceover the evocative, ornate language of gothic literature — is as dynamic and chameleonic as his visuals. That he draws on different influences and deploys different methods to generate fear and anxiety each time — this film from its opening seconds is far more dependent on its soundscape than Blackcoat, for example — adds to the unease, as one can't quite be sure what leverage the film is going to use to worm its way under your skin.

Speaking of those opening seconds, Pretty Thing establishes its mood and pace with a set of visual and auditory motifs —

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the gorgeously blurred phantasms drifting against dark backgrounds that recur at key points throughout, the bookending, slowly panning spotlit point of view shots of the house and its occupants at night, and the scratchily distorted narration

— that expertly set the table in a way that serves but also somewhat overshadows the spare, somewhat austere story to come. If the remaining 80 minutes can't quite live up to the promise of the stellar opening sequence, Perkins still displays a beautifully calibrated touch when it comes to mood, atmosphere, and pacing, managing to keep one unsettled for nearly the entire film without resorting to more than one or two of the more gimmicky, empty calorie scares in which even high quality entries in this genre tend to overindulge.

If I have a direct complaint, it's that Ruth WIlson — who I liked quite a bit in a very different role in The Little Stranger, Lenny Abrahamson's attempt at the gothic chiller — has an air of strength that doesn't seem to quite fit the role of a nurse so fearful and demure that she can't read more than a few pages of a 55-year-old ghost story and slaps her own hand when she feels tempted to snoop in a desk drawer. Lucy Boynton — who somehow does quite a bit with an extremely small and limited role in this after standing out as one of the best parts of Blackcoat — would probably also have had trouble shrinking herself into that lead character, but I admit I'd be curious to see a version of this where she swapped roles with Wilson.

Anyway, recommended for fans of Perkins and this subgenre, and a nice entry point for those who haven't yet seen his work.