I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House
by Oz Perkins
Paris Film
Some people like to skip over Halloween and careen straight into Christmas, or so the mall would have me believe. But I like to extend Halloween as long as possible, if for no other reason than the fact that where I live Fall has just barely started. So yesterday I covered myself with a protective layer of cats (plus one dog) and watched the Netflix haunted house movie, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House.
This review is spoilery. Super spoilery. SPOILERS AHEAD. If you don’t want spoilers, don’t read this review. Having said that, you should know that honestly this is a movie that spoils itself within seconds. It’s clearly a “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey” type of movie.
Within the first five minutes, the viewer is told or shown the following via images and a voice over spoken by the main character, Lily:
- There’s a ghost.
- Lily is going to die within the year.
I’ll add a #3: There’s no romance, which is implied from the get-go because this movie is largely about isolation.
Lily smiles a practiced, fixed smile into the camera, as we hear:
I have heard myself say that the house that holds the memory of a death is the staying place of a rotted ghost. I am 28 years old. I will never be 29. The pretty thing you are looking at is me. But it is me that still cannot see any of what is coming.
Lily, played by Ruth Wilson, is a hospice nurse who is hired to care for Iris, an elderly author of horror novels. This job requires Lily to live in a rural but bright and attractive house in near total isolation (Iris never has visitors). Weird stuff happens, but less often than you’d think. If the house ghost intends harm, she’s not very efficient about it. Mostly she’s just vaguely there, another resident of the house. More than any of the sporadic happenings, the house is haunted by a pervasive sense of dread – a sense that death has happened there, and that death is about to happen again.
This is not Ruth Wilson’s first rodeo when it comes to playing caretakers in creepy houses. She played Jane Eyre (my favorite Jane Eyre!) in the 2006 miniseries. But while Jane Eyre is hard to faze, Lily is wracked with anxiety before the ghost even gets started on her. She’s so nervous she can barely talk. She’s referred to as a hospice nurse, although she’s expected to stay on for a year or longer. It’s not her first job, and yet she’s considerably distressed and surprised when Iris calls her “Polly.” I’m not an expert on elder care, but I can say that the nurses who care for my uncle (he has Alzheimer’s) are a kind but unflappable lot. The patients can call them anything they want to and they don’t bat an eye. They’ve heard it all. I have no idea what to make of the fact that Lily goes all to pieces because her dying elderly patient keeps thinking she’s someone else, except that Lily is very, very worried about losing her sense of self (this comes up for her often).
Anyway, Lily finds out that Polly is a character in one of Iris’ novels. This becomes real torture for the viewer because the novel sounds totally amazing and WE CAN’T READ IT. What diabolical shit is this? Gimme the damn book, already!
In the novel, the book’s narrator says that she is simply relating a story told to her by Polly, who is dead. And the narrator never writes down what finally happened to Polly, because Polly won’t tell her. As the story very slowly (seriously, you can’t imagine how slowly this movie is paced) and very atmospherically creeps to its close, we come a little closer to finding out Polly’s fate, and closer to the end of Lily’s last year.
This movie didn’t seem like much when I watched it but I keep picking at it in my mind. I have questions. For instance, what the hell does Lily do all day? Is she seriously expected not to interact with anyone for as long as two to three years? Does she get days off? Does she have any hobbies besides bleaching her clothes and trying to fix the TV?
Is Lily the worst nurse ever, or did the director just cut the scenes in which Lily does her job in order to focus on the haunting? Nurses are THE BEST, whatever kinds of nurses they are, and they do hard, messy, physical work. The only time Lily is shown to be caring for her patient is when she brushes her hair. Does Lily read to Iris? Does she take her on outings? Does anything enriching happen at all, or does Lily just let Iris stare out the window all the time? What kind of toll does bathing and feeding and interacting with Iris take on Lily? Is her day constantly interrupted by the demands of care, and if so, what effect does that have on her?
Pondering these omissions led me to think about how many movies and books involve women who are haunted while caring for another person. Off the top of my head, I thought of Mama, The Babadook, Under the Shadow, The Others, The Turn of the Screw, Beloved, The Orphanage, The Haunting of Hill House, Dark Water, The Boy, and the upcoming Shut In.
To be someone’s full-time caregiver is to be haunted by their needs. Your days and nights are constantly interrupted. It’s earthy work – whether you are caring for children or adults, it’s likely to involve snot and vomit and urine and feces and blood at some point. Your own body becomes not quite your own and the experience can be intensely isolating. It’s fascinating to me that the caregiving experience is so deeply associated with ghost stories given how ambivalent and intense the experience of caregiving is.
I Am The Pretty Thing… ignores the tasks of caregiving while highlighting the sense of isolation. Lily is isolated not only by her job but by her own fear. She took the job to “get away” from a break-up, and she’s afraid to call her ex. She has friends, but she’s awkward on the phone with them (she uses the word “anyhoo” like she’s squeezing it out of her body). She wears white to show that she is untouchable, as she explains in another voiceover:
I am very seldom required to swear white by my employers. But, anyway, I always do. It has always been that wearing white reassures the sick that I can never be touched. Even as darkness folds in on them from every side, closing like a claw.
Iris is also isolated, not just by age and illness but by her own past. She has no friends or family. Flashbacks show her alone, interacting only with the ghost of Polly, whom she speaks of with intense longing. Was Polly her only friend? Was she in love with Polly? Why did Polly stop talking to her? Was it simply because Polly had run out of things to say, having told her own story, and now she’s drawn back by Lily’s new supply of edginess? Why does Polly talk to Iris but not to Lily? Is Lily too afraid to listen?
These are questions that go largely unanswered. Polly did have a relationship during her life, but the relationship ended, shall we say, badly. Unlike the other women, she doesn’t seem to have been isolated or fearful. And the motives of her ghost are unclear. Maybe the only pattern among the women is that we carry within us the seeds of our own destruction.
While I was not a fan of Lily as a person, I thought Ruth Wilson’s performance was excellent. She acts much younger than her stated age of 28, and the staging helps with this – when she talks to a friend on the phone she gossips and wraps the telephone cord (remember those?) around her as though she’s a teenager. Her narrations sound like lines from a book (maybe Iris’ book?) and in her interactions with Iris she projects confident authority but when she converses with her boss she stammers. Lily is a construct who can’t find an authentic center other than fear.
I Am the Pretty Thing… is not scary so much as it is creepy. There are only two jump scares, although the second one made me scream so loud that my protective layer of cats abandoned me (thank goodness for my dog, who just looked confused). The cinematography is lovely, at least, as far as I could tell with a cat sitting on my face. If you are going to enjoy this movie, you have to be willing to spend a lot of minutes watching Ruth Wilson open a box. Almost every movement in the movie is slow. But the creep factor sticks around.
I’m still not entirely sure why the end of the movie happens in the way and at the moment that it does, and I’m still not sure what I think of the movie. But I can say that it looks incredible, and I can say that the movie itself is haunting, Certainly I’ve spent a lot of time trying to puzzle it out. And I enjoyed the strong performances by the women at the heart of the movie – I only wish I knew more about their characters.
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is available for streaming on Netflix.
It was a nice looking movie, but it had no depth, nor was it scary or creepy or really anything but pretty. It was boring and way too slow.
I watched it with my sister, and we sat through the whole thing expecting some big ghostly payout at the end, and were both super disappointed with the ending and movie as a whole.
“If the house ghost intends harm, she’s not very efficient about it.”
For better or worse, to keep horror movies going most ghosts are fairly incompetent. If a ghost has to reveal its killer, it will guide the hero/heroine to a key, then to a secret room, then to a journal, then to a portrait with a vital clue instead of just moving a pen and writing “Fred killed me.” Likewise, a homicidal ghost won’t just drop a chandelier on someone or stab them with a knife, but instead have a large number of close calls and minor injuries.
OMG, you’re so right about care-giving isolation and haunting… I’ve been dealing full time with somebody’s mental illness for months, and my WIP is a haunted house story–something I’ve never been inspired to write before. I hadn’t made that connection, but it makes total sense.
I’m normally not into scary movies, but this looks really good. This review was beautifully written as well.
@jimthered – would that wer were so lucky to have a ghost that leads us hither and yon. This ghost doesn’t do much of anything. when she does, it’s super creepy, but it’s also super rare.
@Christine – hugs to you! Are you getting any support for yourself?
@ Carrie S Yes, though thanks for asking! Fortunately, we moved back to the area where I grew up just before everything went off the rails, so we have my parents. And tremendous support from the school and a great psychiatrist… plus pets, chocolate and books…
I spent a lot of the movie wondering how they got food/supplies into the house. I had the impression that the book was set in the present, but Lily doesn’t have a cell phone or laptop.
And why would she be there solely on call? I’ve known people who had in-home caretakers, and there were at least 2, handling different shifts. I’m pretty sure there are requirements for that. Of course, given Lily’s lack of talent, EvilLawyer probably hired her off Craigslist.
Nurses are almost always great. Mom’s hospice nurse (Mom was at a facility for a very short time, not in-house) wouldn’t have blinked at a ghost, could have probably gone back in time and rescued Polly, and still turned her charts in on time.
@MirandaB: I KNOW! I had no problem believing in the ghost but a lot of problems believeing that lily was an actual hospice nurse.
A respite nurse working in an isolated area? That reminds me of Skeleton Key, a great creepy movie which also shows the nurse doing her job.
Regarding “Women who are haunted while in the care of another person” see:
The VVitch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQXmlf3Sefg
I got the feeling Lilly was dead and also haunting the house. That she did not know she was dead until she had a flash back of what had happened to her. Part of the movie focus was on not remembering how you die.
Just finished this movie, yeah I guess I’ll call it a movie. I have kids so I had to restart it twice, but I am still confused, kinda upset I actually put off doing laundry to dedicate an hour and a half to watch. I usually read spoilers first but for this I wanted to be surprised. I also got the feeling lily was dead the whole movie but didn’t realize it until the end. I was more interested in why she told her friend to tell someone hello but not to say it was her on the phone. Yeah I’m gonna give this movie a 2 out of 10, it gets a 2 because I really liked the house, very rustic and charming.
I kept waiting for the twist and imagining progressively elaborate ways for it to end, but nothing came of it. What actually happened? Kudos to you for finding some sense in the isolation. I thought there would be more to it than there was.
Personally I felt this movie was a PSA on black mold. Everything else was just metaphors and overactive imagination. Polly was a story , Iris was in late stages of dementia , her connection to her past was her most famous novel , and Lily died due to being severely ill with the toxic effect that accompanies black mold exposure . The whole concept was from Lily’s perspective and how the progression of the toxicity manifested itself in her reality. Basically look up the effects of black mold on the human body and watch the movie with it in mind. Really, from this opinion , the movie is quite genius.
I enjoyed this movie strictly because of how unique it was. The structure of it was interesting, with the combination of visuals and prose to move the story along. I enjoyed that it strayed away from conventional horror, abandoning visual scares in favor of mood as a source of terror. I have been complaining to anyone that will listen about my beef with modern horror and the how the seeming lack of creativity that is slowing becoming more apparent, so this movie was really a treat for me. The pacing didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would, I actually rarely lost interest at any point.
There was one thing that really bothers me (in a good way) about this movie, though: the symbolism. What is the meaning behind Polly’s backward-facing legs? What were the umbilical cord-like strands that Polly and Lily were eating at certain sequences? Were the cords an extension of Polly’s line “I left this world the way I entered it”, kind of like a metaphor for a reverse-birth? The movie really got to me, and I’m really trying to understand and wrap my head around it.
So, the house was to be left to a female, to write and live. Like Virginia Wolfe’s “A Room of Ones on.” A woman can only be free to write without the worry of lodging- or men.
This movie really captivated me. Not once did i lose interest and always had me guessing what in the actual f#!$ was happening! Lily was getting haunted by polly who was buried into the walls. Iris wrote of pollys story for she would talk to her, but never talked about the end of her story…there was talk of the hluse being built and some kind of wedding? So my guess is, that during pollys flashbacks, shes blind folded in her dress because her husband(who killed her) was showing her the new house…but why did he kill her?? Is that why polly cant tell iris the ending of the story, because her too, cant understand it?? Just like us lolol. I really dont know, twisty eerie movie…so at the end, the rotted body of polly in the walls kills lily because of the black mold? And possibly the same reason/fate for iris as well. Whos the guy with the master key at the end? Simply just the man in charge of selling the house, or lilys boss?? Or iris husband??? Do we ever hear of him ever?? Soo many questions still, which makes this movie so great, but i wouuuuld like a solid answeer to what is actually happening, as i know, sure, most of us seem to want.
Thanks for the blog and the insights about the isolation theme and the role of the mold. I just finished the film and found it unsatisfying. I don’t mind numerous loose ends; that only means that those mysteries are not key to the point of the story (they are kntended, I suspect, to keep the story rolling around in the audience’s mind for a few days afterward.). Moreover, good spooksters almost always include unresolved mysteries. But I found the film to be so obscure in its references and cues that Came away nonplussed. Yes, I can match voice-over lines with developments in the story…but I’m stil not getting it.
I’m perfectly willing to say that I’m the dumb one. Still, lacking any bone tossed to me upon the first viewing, I am not motivated to try a second. Sorreeeeeee…
What a non sensical movie..an utter waste of 1.5 hours