Netflix’s His House Is Terrifying on Just About Every Level - Vulture

It’s a haunted house flick, only the setting isn’t some moody, gray old manse but a run-down row house in a bleak, impoverished English suburb, where Bol (Gangs of London’s Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù) and his wife, Rial (Lovecraft Country’s Wunmi Mosaku), have just arrived from South Sudan, penniless and shell-shocked.

Husband and wife have sudden, ghostly visions of their treacherous ocean crossing.

The terrors of His House have been interwoven with the terrors of the refugee experience, which lends the story emotional depth and also ensures that its shocks linger, disturbingly, with little relief or closure.

The differences in temperament between husband and wife are telling: Bol pursues the sounds, looks in the holes, determined to confront what’s there; he wants to make this house his.

Appropriate, but also a clever bit of misdirection from Weekes: The real horror, we eventually learn, runs deeper, and reaches farther back.

The delicacy with which Bol touches the walls of their new house — despite the fact that the place is a decaying trash heap — conveys the care he hopes to give to it, as well as his fear of upsetting the gentle balance of this new life.

The story arcs not toward clarity but toward complexity and gnawing discomfort; the more we learn about Bol and Rial, the more complicated and human they become, and the messier and more ghastly their past becomes.

His House is beautifully made, and its scares are monstrously effective, but its images of real-world dread remain unresolved, its specters unvanquished?