I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House

The acting was subtle and well done, the story was intriguing (if its potential was never fully met), and the near silent tone of the movie was a strength more than a drawback. There will be unanswered questions, and that annoys a lot of people. If you are like me and prefer to leave with questions, you will appreciate this flick more.

I don't think the criticism calling it boring it fair. A lot is going on in the background if you pay attention. It reminds me of Victorian ghost stories. Not everything has to be extreme to be worth viewing.

All in all it has its problems, but worth watching if you don't mind a slow build.

A young nurse takes care of elderly author who lives in a haunted house.

This film seems to be getting negative responses from people, at least if I take IMDb as any sort of serious guide. At this time (January 2017) it sits at 4.8, which isn't awful but is certainly far from great. Having now seen the film, I find the low rating surprising. The acting is great, and there is nothing wrong with the film as far as technical matters go.

My guess is that people have the wrong mindset. The film was promoted by Rue Morgue, among others, and maybe people got caught up in some hype of Oz Perkins or misunderstood. Much like the recent Guillermo del Toro ghost story, people need to see this type of horror (the "gothic romance") as different from what they expect. It might be slower and there will be less blood. But it is about creating a mood, which I think this film does rather well.

It's not much fun being one of the people who says a slow-paced horror movie is boring. Personally, I sometimes feel kind of shallow when I do, and it makes me confront the possibility that maybe I just don't have it in me to understand or properly appreciate a slow-burn.

But with I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House... I don't know. I don't feel too bad about not liking this one. There's some occasionally striking imagery, and I think parts of the set-up were neat, but it otherwise felt like an attempt at making a horror film as slow and minimalist as humanly possible. In my eyes, there was little purpose to the slowness, and it instead gives the impression that this was a short film poorly stretched out to something that was ultimately on the shorter side of feature-length.

You can watch it at no additional cost if you're already subscribed to Netflix, but even with that cheapness/accessibility, I find this hard to recommend.

Wow, is this movie ever pretty. Aptly named.

I was captured by the very first scene of the girl in the dress. Like a painting from the futurism style, it blends movement and motion into a final still, out of focus, and it looks stunning on the mostly black big screen. All of this is overlayed with narration that is simply perfectly spoken (which is consistent for the film, a beautiful read), but more importantly beautifully written. The narration, which comprises most of the spoken lines of the film, is more a poem than a movie script, and I appreciated it for it. The image was a painting, the words were literature, as a whole the film was successful as an art piece.

It revolves around a live-in nurse moving into a house to care for an old author who used to write horror books. The nurse starts experiencing subtle signs of a haunting, and finds a strange connection between what is happening to her and one of the author's most famous books.

As an idea, it was the kind of quiet horror I love, channeling fear through the uncanny, like old written weird fiction (my mind took me back to reading the Yellow Wallpaper by Gilman). Fear is not even the right word, as nothing about the film is scary, really. More like a feeling of wrongness with the world, an existential dread of sorts.

Not to detract from the beauty of the art on display, which was anything but shallow, but the plot itself unfortunately was. Pretty, but surface. Only unfinished hints of a story, that relies a bit too heavily on the viewer to fill in the gaps. I am always a fan of ambiguity, and it is almost necessary for me in a horror film (definites tend to disappoint), but there is still a balance to be struck with some concrete details. Osgood Perkins' last film, February, struck the perfect balance between ambiguity and detail, and for that was my favourite horror of 2015. Here, unfortunately, the scale has moved too much in one direction, to the point of feeling unfinished and not entirely satisfying. I also did not love the ending, which is much too close to that of another stunningly subtle recent horror, by one of the most famous current horror directors. Actually, I loved the ending (as a part of the story on display), it fit very well, I just didn't love that I had already seen it so recently. A sad problem of timing.

All in all, I can't possibly not recommend The Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, because it is a soul-satisfying kind of pretty, from sound to visuals to acting. But if what you're after is horror (or even a particularly engaging drama), it won't quench that kind of thirst. Only one for beauty.

Gothic horror is such a dismally overlooked genre, so many fascinating concepts to draw in, many many tales, so when one comes along, such as this, my curiosity and anticipation were high. Definitely positives can be taken, it is beautifully told, Ruth Wilson is a superb actress and story teller. The production values are strong, the story intriguing, but, those strong elements are somehow given a disservice by the execution, the delivery is meant to be slow deliberately, but is done in a way that makes the film boring, annoyingly it never seems to come to life, and the ending is woefully inadequate. Maybe my expectations were too high, this was disappointing. 5/10