There is a certain sobriety that dominates films about refugees. Most writers and directors won’t venture beyond drama in their cinematic representations of forcibly displaced people. This is understandable: Mass population movements—some of the most urgent humanitarian crises of our time—are defined by trauma, violence, and death. Form follows content. In recent years, however, there have been a handful of trailblazers willing to break through the limits of the dramatic genre. In their hands, refugee stories move beyond stereotypes of grief, showing the multi-faceted qualities of a life lived away from home.
British director Remi Weekes’ first feature, the Sundance breakout His House (2020), is one such film. It tells the story of Bol and Rial, a young refugee couple from South Sudan, who move into an estate house in the outskirts of London only to realize, before long, that it is haunted. An understated, yet resoundingly impactful exploration of the overlap between the real-life horrors of a refugee’s journey and the metaphor-heavy horror genre, His House offers a multi-sensory manifestation of the ghosts that refugees carry with them.
The film opens with a living nightmare: Bol (Sope Dirisu) and his wife Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) are in a refugee detention center in the UK, waiting for a committee to adjudicate their case. They share a room with another refugee, who warns them that they ‘will be sent back’ before long. Lying on his wife’s lap, Bol dreams of the terrifying sea crossing that led to their daughter Nyagak’s death. When he wakes up, he tells Rial that he “dreamt about [their] wedding day”, a white lie characteristic of Bol’s determination to start afresh in the UK. The whole film revolves around this central tension: can the couple let go of their past in order to build a new life in the present? Should they?
The dilapidated estate house that Bol and Rial move into is the perfect claustrophobic setting for Weekes to delve deep into the couple’s survivors’ guilt. Like many haunted house movies, that something is wrong in their new home is obvious from the very beginning: the first night they spend at the house, Bol hears strange voices coming from behind the living room’s walls. Unlike other horror movies, however—and here lies the ingenuity of Weekes’ script—Bol doesn’t need to work hard to convince Rial of the presence of ghosts among them. She already knows. They’re being haunted by an apeth, she explains. A ‘night witch’ that they brought with them from South Sudan. The only way to stop it? Go back home and ‘pay [their] debts’. But Bol refuses to return. So determined is he to deal with the ghosts himself, that he locks Rial inside and starts breaking through the walls of the house with a hammer. When that fails, he asks the government office responsible for their settlement to be moved to another home, claiming that their own has a rat infestation problem. He fails, and risks being labelled as ‘difficult’, jeopardizing the couple’s stay in the UK.
The state of the refugee is a haunted state: Haunted by an irretrievable past; haunted by places and people that one longs for but is unable to return to. It’s no surprise then that the horror genre is the perfect vehicle for visualizing, and externalizing, the inner hauntings that Bol and Rial experience. His House has a good amount of panic-inducing jump scares, in a nod to recent horror gems including Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018). The effect is that the audience gets to feel a muted version of the physical sensation of terror that Bol and Rial must have experienced during their escape from South Sudan. The film also works with the psychoanalytical aspects of the horror genre, intelligently applied to a post-colonial perspective. Rial accuses Bol of bringing the wrath of the apeth on both of them because of his conformity to the British and his readiness to forego his native culture. For a while, the couple turn on each other, blurring the lines between the external and internal forces that threaten them.
The powerful effect of Weekes’ interpretation of the refugee narrative through supernatural horror is most evident in one of the scenes where Bol confronts the apeth. Other than the light from a campfire, and the glowing eyes of the apeth, the scene is pitch dark. Placing his hand on the fire, Bol realizes that he is faced with an illusion, an unreality: the apeth can’t physically touch him. In defiance, he shouts out: ‘Pictures can’t hurt me!’ But he couldn’t be further from the truth: pictures (images and memories of the past) can and do hurt him.
In fact, His House makes it clear that the conjuring images of Nyagak and other lives lost during the refugee journey is the apeth’s source of power, the main weapon it wields against Bol and Rial. In one of the most chilling scenes of the film, the apeth presents Bol with an apparition of Nyagak’s drowning. Bol tries to turn away from the sight of his dying daughter but—in a cruel exhibition of power— the apeth wraps his hands around Bol’s face and turns it towards Nyagak, from whose mouth an octopus emerges. Similarly, in a tender if uncanny scene in which Rial is transported back to her home town, surrounded by female friends in colorful Sudanese dress moments before an apparent massacre killed them all, the apeth forces Rial to confront the terrible lie, or ‘debt’, that is at the center of the couple’s haunting.
With its bold, horror-genre approach, Remi Weekes’ His House joins a few other notable genre-bending films about refugeedom, including Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki’s The Other Side of Hope (2017), where deadpan comedy meets a contemporary refugee storyline; and Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019), a supernatural ghost story about the people and places that refugees and migrants leave behind. But where Diop’s film fell short of tying all of its loose ends, Weekes’ tight script delivers an ending that is as gut-wrenching as the film’s opening scene.
Having defeated the apeth, Bol and Rial fix up the house, and greet the government officials that come to check up on them warmly, with a smile. This is their home now, they assure them; no problems here. They’ve learnt to live with their ghosts. Standing alone in their house after the inspection is complete, Bol and Rial look into the room across the hall, which is crowded with apparitions of all those they’ve left behind, including Nyagak. The camera then switches back to a final view of the couple, now surrounded by dozens of other refugees and immigrants, the countless people with whom they share a fate, and a home.
Remi Weekes’ His House (2020) now screening on Netflix