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:

1. There’s a ghost.
2. 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.