We already know how it will end. Lily Saylor will be dead in less than a year, as her already-dead self tells us in voiceover in the beginning of the film. Instead of using the bloodiness and jumpscares of classic haunted house stories, Director Osgood Perkins gives us a slow meditation on death. The plot is not well defined, and dialogue is sparse. The film hangs itself onto uncertainty, shrouded in the atmosphere of waiting and dreading. Lily is a hospice nurse taking care of former horror writer, Iris Blum, in Iris’ old Massachusetts home. The house is haunted by the ghost of Polly, a character in one of Iris’ novels. Lily is nervous and easily frightened by the “creepy” house and by the dreadful things that Iris, who calls her “Polly,” says to her. There is a disturbing closed-in feeling, as the whole story takes place inside of the house, and Lily becomes increasingly neurotic. She is caught in a purgatory where she is cut off from the outside world and time seems to hold no bearing. The pace of the film is one of slow seduction. It is replete with long takes of characters being silent and still in dim lighting. There is so little motion that when Lily makes a even a small twitch, you are set on edge. Just when the pace starts to quicken up, it slows back down. While the slowness can be unbearable at times, you are completely immersed in Lily’s seemingly endless waiting for her death. You are trapped in the house as much as Lily is. Between scenes of Lily fumbling around nervously in the house are haunting images of blurred female ghosts floating in darkness. They are the “pretty things that live in the house.” They are not ghosts that relentlessly taunt and hurt humans, but they seem to exist in a different plane. They are silent and motionless. These images are suspended from the rest of the plot, interrupting the slow waiting, and showing what will become of Lily in the end. The apparitions add beauty to the film, portraying death as frightening but not necessarily evil. In a breathy, solemn voice, the already-dead Lily narrates the whole film in voiceover. Her prose is a lyrical meditation on the nature of death and its inevitableness. Although the words are beautiful and add to the mood, they are too long-winded and overwrought for a movie and better suited for a poem or novel. You have to pay good attention to the voiceover because it makes up quite a large part of the film’s substance. One could argue that the prose holds the film together as much as the plot does. The film is somewhat atemporal, seamlessly showing Lily in the house and then a young Iris sitting at her typewriter and then flashing to Polly’s murder. It is unclear how the past, present, and future interact, and whether or not the events are really happening or only happening in the characters’ minds. Understanding the story requires a sort of dream logic. Trying too hard to make sense of the plot leads you into the trap of circular thinking. Whether this confusion is the result of poor storytelling or if it is a successful attempt to trap you into the irrationality of a nightmare is questionable. I am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House is not as much of a ghost story as it is a death story. The anxiety that courses through the film provokes the dread that comes with recognizing that we are all sentenced to death. Characters who refer to themselves as dead in the voiceover are shown living and acting on the screen. They are, in a sense, dead and alive at the same time. This suggests a kind of inseparability between oneself and one’s death. You are born with death inside of you, and in the process of living, you make a ghost out of yourself. This is a strange film that is definitely not for all viewers. Not only does it demand patience, but it also lies in a twilight zone between cleverness and nonsense. In some ways, it is more compelling to contemplate than it is to watch. Never has a film ever made me think of my own death for so long after watching it. |
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Allison Lee is an undergraduate student at the University of Houston. She is part of the Glass Mountain staff. She likes to walk her dog in the evenings. |
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