A Filmmaker's Review: "I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House" (Netflix, 2016)

This film, released to Netflix in 2016, is a grand mixture between gothic romance and strange, almost Hitchcockian, vibes. I would not call it a perfect horror movie, but it is definitely enjoyable to watch because the gothic and the supernatural connections really resonate through the screen as the narration beats on. The pros and cons to this movie are many, but the performances are definitely an advantage, giving this film a highly expressive edge in which both women, Lily and Polly, seem to be connected by the fact that they could physically not see what was coming. With Lily admitting that she has not been able to see Polly until recently and Polly being physically blindfolded before being bludgeoned to death. The strange noises around the Blum residence and the psychological torture of the protagonist in being constantly mistaken for a then unknown women named Polly seem to come out in whispers throughout the film.

The gothic vibe is definitely created through these three different times: the far past, the written past and the present. The far past is the one in which Polly is alive and walking around the house, blindfolded before being murdered. The written past is the part where Iris Blum writes Polly’s biography entitled “The Lady in the Walls” which then turns out to be one of her most read horror novels ever. Finally, the present is the one in which Lily is caring for the now elderly and seemingly maddened Iris Blum who is so old that nobody expects her to live more than a few years.

The cinematography is definitely the film’s strength as it strangely moves from silent housing to glimpses or indescribable glances at Polly around the house and over the course of the eleven months in which Lily is there, we see things that become repeated motifs of Polly’s existence. These things include the turned up carpet, the static of the woman screaming on the television, the metallic sounds of screws and the thumping hammer-like noise coming from the ground floor seemingly every night. These are filmed with precision as to not show the audience too much, but to give us a close-up feeling of these motifs having some sort of impact on Lily as she gets closer to whoever Polly is.

The ending though, felt a bit rushed. Certainly the sequence where Lily sees Polly’s ghost in full form for the first time was initially confusing to me because I had no idea what had just happened. Yes, she had seen Polly’s ghost before, in some respects she saw them through other things but, in this case I could not understand why she would be so bewildered by the ghost after living there for eleven months and knowing full well that the ghost existed. The whole situation about Polly turning her back so that she walks with her feet facing the wrong way and her head facing the wrong way were, I believe, done so that it would make Polly look almost inhuman. I am now not sure if this worked entirely because the audience are given the most sympathy towards Polly and, throughout the film you could say that Lily was intruding upon this story she had no business in. The story never really makes it clear. This could be seen as an advantage because it makes the thought of the film’s narrative linger in your mind, but also could be seen as a disadvantage for not having any real clarity at this point.

With my closing statement on this film, I would again like to praise all the performances in the movie and rethink my stance on Lucy Boynton whom in one of my articles I named one of the worst actresses of all time. I retract that statement as her performance in this film, though she says very little, is expressive in ways I have not seen in a ghost-horror film for a while. All in all, the film is vastly enjoyable and I am definitely going to watch it again because of its sense and understanding of the gothic. But in terms of clarity it may need some tidying up in certain places. But as a concluding statement - it is well worth the 87 minutes running time.