IT LIVES INSIDE **** USA / Canada 2023 Dir: Bishal Dutta. 99 mins
Co-writer / director Dutta’s feature debut gives us a fairly familiar American teen / demon scenario with a refreshing perspective. The opening glimpses of Indian-American protagonist Samidha (Megan Suri) (who’s appealing and authentic) reveals her shaving her arms, using phone filters to lighten her skin colour and being patronised at school by peers who “mean well”.
While Dutta crafts a convincing, loving family at the core, we’re introduced to Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), formerly a close friend of Samidha’s, but now leading an alienated existence. While Samidha strove to fit into the U.S. school system, Tamira failed to do so and now wanders around in a detached, seemingly petrified fashion, looked on as a weirdo and eating lunch alone under the bleachers. Moreover, the strange glass jar she carries around is pivotal to the plot: inside is a contained demon and, in a moment of frustration, Samidha smashes it…
Largely avoiding the cheap scares that often ruin films like this, IT LIVES INSIDE underplays the demon’s appearances, mostly restricting it to the childhood nightmare fuel of a pair of glowing eyes in a bedroom closet. The climactic full exposure inevitably takes the edge off, though it’s still an interesting, distinctive antagonist in a film with a pleasingly offbeat take. Well acted and delivering a couple of startling attack scenes (notably a savaging on a playground swing), it meshes the family’s traditions with the unleashed curse and a genre-requisite deadline for banishing it. Suri is excellent and Betty Gabriel shines as a sympathetic teacher.
Review by Steven West
IT LIVES INSIDE is available to rent/buy on Amazon Prime Video in the UK and USA
Also available on Blu-ray and DVD in the USA