I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016)

This is an incredible ghost story. Minimal blood and gore. Pure and simple story telling from the perspective of the shade. Many will think it is dry, dull and lame. But this is what film making and story telling is meant to be. A nice homage to Lovecraft and other turn of the century story tellers. It works on many levels. Camera angels, shading and form. Brilliant but not pretentious.

Fmovies: I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House distills the components of the "haunted house" concept into something more refined and cerebral... almost poetic. Rejecting the classic tricks of the horror genre, director and screenwriter Oz Perkins focuses on the main character's delicate psychology, whose vulnerability becomes fertile ground on which the paranoia created by a supernatural presence seeking attention will flourish. Unfortunately, that elevated artistic ambition isn't translated on a particularly agile movie; on the opposite, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House feels occasionally frustrating and pretentious. Most of this film consists on cryptic monologues from the disembodied narrator, and scenes with the main character walking through the house, working at the kitchen, reading books or examining the mold forming on a wall. However, Perkins creates a tense atmosphere which makes even the most puerile scenes interesting... as long as we have the necessary patience to put up with the languid rhythm of the movie, and we don't expect constant shocks, digital apparitions or any of the other usual clichés of contemporary horror. And the reward for that patience is the narrative crumbs left by Perkins along the road, which were enough to keep me interested in the resolution of the big mystery. It's not a particularly complicated mystery, but its methodic development is simultaneously organic and intuitive. There are definitely answers to the multiple questions raised by this film... but the spectator needs to make an effort to find them. If that sounds interesting, you will probably appreciate the parsimonious pros of this film; if not, stay away from it and seek something more "normal" (I found Lights Out and The Conjuring 2 solid recent alternatives of supernatural horror). And well, I think anyone will be able to appreciate Julie Kirkwood's exceptional cinematography and the solid performances from Ruth Wilson, Lucy Boynton and Paula Prentiss. Thinking about it well, it might not be correct to describe I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House as a horror film. I think it's more appropriate to consider it an intimate drama about loneliness and regret, seasoned by slight supernatural touches. That seems to be Perkins' style: first, he defines the drama, and then, its consequences are explored... either in this life or in other one.

I don't often write reviews on IMDb, but I really wanted to for this movie because it was getting a lot of negative reviews.

I will start by saying that I understand why many people did not enjoy this movie. It is a horror movie and story out of time.

In a world where fast paced, jump scare horror is the common trend, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is something entirely other. It takes cues, primarily, from Gothic literature and Kubrick style film making.

As far as the story goes, it is slow and brooding. I think this is something quite different from boring, but is easily to mistake for it, especially if that style of storytelling isn't your style.

It takes time to introduce Lily as a character so that you suffer when she does. This is done for long scenes where nothing but character development happens. Since she is in a home where the only other living resident is barely cognizant, it does this through monologues, phone conversations, and her wandering around the house. The writing of the monologues is of a particularly high quality. I was sold on the movie from the opening.

As a movie, it uses slow long or wide shots with jarred cuts to build suspense visually and uses slightly dissonant music to build terror. These tools are used really well. Not quite as well as Lynch or Kubrick, but still great.

In quick summation, if Mary Shelley or, more recently, Susan Hill (who I think may have been at least part of the inspiration for Iris) wrote the screenplay for The Shining, you would get I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. If that sounds interesting to you, you will love it. If it doesn't, you will likely hate it.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House fmovies. On its surface, it would be very easy to outright dismiss writer/director Osgood Perkins' atmospheric Gothic-horror picture "I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House." And for good reason. The film is an exercise in deliberation. But it is an exercise that goes too far too often, and suffers for it. Without doubt, most viewers who choose to indulge in viewing it will find their minds wandering and themselves nodding off within the first act because the film's pacing and structure lend to an overpowering sense of tedium and dullness. This is without doubt the very definition of a "slow burn." It both literally and figuratively crawls from scene to scene, with dialog delivered in drawn out whispers and characters moving as if filmed in slow motion at all times. Even as someone with a great bit of patience for films such as this, I found myself checking my phone more times than I'd like to admit.

And yet... I never felt the urge to stop watching. Because despite this glaring issue, the craftsmanship and storytelling is completely enthralling and endlessly engaging, with a grand old-fashioned vibe that I couldn't help but be pulled into from the very first scene. In many ways, it reminded me of the campfire ghost stories of old, classic Hollywood creep-fests of the 50's and 60's and the ancient photographs of ghosts and spirits you stumble across when you research the supernatural. So much of the film is so lovingly assembled to tell a classic tale of the unknown that I couldn't help but watch it start-to-finish... even when it very nearly put me to sleep more than once.

The film follows the tale of a lonely and easily frightened young woman called Lily (Ruth Wilson), who is hired to serve as a live-in caregiver to retired author Iris Blum (Paula Prentiss) in her final years. But as the film informs us through a wonderfully poetic opening narration, Lily's future is a dark one- she tells us that within the year, she will be dead, and we will be witness to the events that lead up to her passing. And the film follows just what happened, as Lily is haunted by strange sounds and visions and begins to suspect that there is something very wrong in the home of Iris Blum. Something that may be connected to her most popular novella- a tale of horror called "The Lady in the Walls."

The strengths of the film lay in Perkins capable hands as a storyteller. The film is absolutely stunning to behold, with an intriguing premise that keeps you thoroughly invested and some of the most gorgeous cinematography in some time, despite the film taking place almost entirely inside of a single house. The expert sense of composition and movement that Perkins excels at builds and maintains a startling and sometimes overwhelming sense of dread and pure guttural terror, and his keen use of carefully calculated jumps will illicit some serious creeps for open minded horror fans. He also wisely keeps the film both focused but also vague, giving it a bit of a mystery flair that will keep you wondering what will come next. And of course, as mentioned before, the dialog and structure of the film is pure poetry. Very classy work.

But it comes at a cost. That being the frankly bizarre sense of pacing that is a result of the calm, calculated storytelling. I hate to say it, but this is a phenomenal short film that is nearly destroyed because it is slowly (and arguably needlessly) dragged to feature length to the point of hilarity and then frustration. There's no good reaso

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.

I would describe 'I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House' as a Gothic short story (or maybe even a Gothic poem) brought to the screen. But forget about all the tropes and visuals that are associated with this genre, it is instead focused on what for me is the essential element of Gothic literature: The dead are alive. This doesn't seem like much to build a narrative on, and the driving force of "Pretty" indeed is not plot, nor characters, nor the solving of a mystery. And while all three things are embedded into its narrative it is first and foremost a tone poem. An important thing about the the-dead-are-alive notion, especially in this film, is that it goes both ways. The living can sense the presence of the dead (AKA ghosts), but the dead actually live on after their death, probably mostly concerned with reliving their past, but they might also be able to sense the living. So who is haunting who?

Consequently "Pretty" presents a ghost story within a ghost story, to put it in simplified terms. In more concrete terms the plot concerns Lily, a nurse who stays in the house of elderly horror fiction writer Iris Blum, to take care of her until her death, which shouldn't be too far into the future now. But it also wouldn't be too wrong to say that the main character is the house that had a few occupants over the course of its lifetime. I don't mean this in the tired old this-and-that-place-is-like-another-character-in-the-film way, the personality of the house certainly is made up of all the people who lived in it. But writer-director Oz Perkins takes the expression "If these walls could talk" and makes it a reality. It is about the people who lived in the house (or more correctly the people who died in it), but for all intents and purposes the main character is the house itself.

"Pretty" starts with nurse Lily's first day at the house and her opening narration tells us that she just turned 28 years old, but that she will never be 29. She talks about death, memory and says "From where I am now, I can be sure of only a very few things." One of those things is her name. So right from the beginning we know that Lily (at least Lily as a narrator) is already dead. Logic dictates that what we see on screen are her hazy memories of her short time in the house. Can we trust her words and can we trust what we see?

In any case, old Iris Blum doesn't talk much. But she keeps calling Lily by the name of Polly. And Lily seems to sense some ghostly presence in the house. Polly, as we soon learn, is the main character of Blum's most famous novel "The Lady in the Walls", a novel of which Blum said it lacks an ending because of "an obligation to be true to the subject" for Polly didn't tell Blum about her ending, but Blum tells us that she is convinced that "as endings go, Polly's was not an especially pretty one." Incidentally there also slowly emerges an ugly, moldy stain on one of the walls in the house that Lily grows concerned about. Is there some connection?

Perkins leaves the viewer in the dark for most of the film's running time about the concrete connections between all the characters, as slow and eventless as the whole thing is it is difficult to keep track of all the points of view. For example Lily isn't the only one whose voice-over we hear, we also hear and see young Blum as she writes the novel, and we hear and see Polly. Those voices also aren't particularly easy