Mark Reviews Movies: THERE'S SOMEONE INSIDE YOUR HOUSE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 5, 2021

Pretty simple and occasionally smart about people's public appearance versus their private reality, There's Someone Inside Your House is a modern take on that old horror tale, in which someone wearing a mask terrorizes a community and kills a bunch of people. The slasher here seems to have unfettered access to any house in the small town where the story takes place. Even more terrifying for a group of teenagers with reputations and appearances to uphold, though, the killer also seems to know everyone's deepest, darkest secret.

That's the central gimmick of Henry Gayden's screenplay, which is based on the 2017 novel by Stephanie Perkins. It's important to note the year of the book's publication, perhaps, because this material does often feel of this contemporary era, when everyone can share everything about his or her life online. Sometimes, people share too much, and often, they only publicize what makes them look like some ideal version of themselves. In the latter case, there's a gap between that ideal and reality, and it's that gap that this killer, wearing a homemade mask of the intended victim's face, exploits.

It's a deviously clever idea, especially after decades of similar genre exercises copying each other and wearing certain gimmicks transparently thin (the supernaturally unstoppable murderer, the vengeful and undead slasher, the mystery of the killer being among the central characters, etc.). Gayden and director Patrick Brice seem on the verge of having something to say about people, society, and/or online culture—beyond who will be killed next, what secrets these characters are hiding, the identity of the murderer, and all of those usual concerns within this genre. That the movie ultimately falls into and for the usual routine of these stories is disappointing.

As per usual, the story opens with a prologue, featuring a mostly anonymous character who is not long for this movie or the world. He's a star football player, getting ready for the game that night with some food—strange, that egg timer sitting on the counter with no one else home—and a quick nap—stranger, his cellphone disappearing and being replaced with that timer while he slept past his wake-up time.

Brice stages this sequence with a fine sense of suspense, as the jock realizes how many things have changed (his bedroom door is ajar), vanished (his phone and pickup truck, most notably), or mysteriously appeared in the house. Then, there's the funny, knowing wink of a warning and a promise, when the title pops up on screen as the football player more or else seals his fate.

The reason someone kills the jock—in a particularly gruesome way, of course—has to do with him leading a violent attack on a gay teammate. After doing the bloody deed, the killer releases video evidence of the crime to every student in school. It's a post-mortem blow, killing the guy's reputation after destroying his body.

Obviously, everyone has a secret in this small town in Nebraska. Makani (Sydney Park), a recent transfer student from Hawaii, apparently has a pretty terrible one, as nightmares flash scenes of a peaceful beach, blemished by a bonfire and broken by the pained screams of a teenage girl. She's a bit of an outsider in her new school, with a tight group of fellow-outsider friends.

Anyway, another student is murdered. This one seemed to be a perfect goody two shoes, but she secretly published a white-supremacist podcast (There's a wickedly amusing moment when the soon-to-be victim, on the phone with the cops, is still trying to make excuses for what she said, instead of worrying about the killer with a long knife). Someone's after people with such secrets, and Makani assumes it's only a matter of time before that someone discovers hers.

The premise here is diabolically crafty, and the filmmakers do the work of making Makani and her friends smarter, more aware, and more sympathetic than they would need to be, if this movie were simply about teens being killed off one by one by a masked slasher. As a group of outsiders, Makani and her crew—including the anxious Rodrigo (Diego Josef), the no-nonsense Alex (Asjha Cooper), the non-binary Darby (Jesse LaTourette), and Zach (Dale Whibley), a cynical-about-his-privilege son of a corporate farmer—possess the kind of social distance to observe and judge what the killer is doing to people they never cared for in the first place.

There are more killings, staged by Brice with no small amount of tension and even sparks of humor (a phone ringing at a most inopportune time and that clandestine racist yelling, "It was satire!"). Makani has a surprisingly tender and mature romance with Oliver (Théodore Pellerin), a guy whom even her socially outcast friends find to be a bit too weird for them. At a certain point, though, the movie's ambitions give way to the familiar clichés and routine plotting of the genre.

There's Someone Inside Your House becomes about the killings, the mystery of the killer, the assorted red herrings standing between the characters and knowing the murderer's identity, and otherwise spinning its wheels until a final, climactic showdown. It's clear the movie wants to be about more than these usual elements, but if a final debate with the killer is any sign, it's also apparent the filmmakers aren't certain what that "more" should be.

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