There are three specters to fear in the British horror flick His House: the trauma that haunts a refugee couple from South Sudan, who are assigned to government housing in an English town; the systemic discrimination that sets them up to fail in their new surroundings; and the folkloric “night witch” who may (or may not) be living in their walls. For awhile this all seems like too much for one film—which is the feature debut of writer-director Remi Weekes—to handle, but then all three forces malevolently merge for a devastating ending. Weekes also shows an adept eye for the genre (the point-of-view shots from inside the walls are particularly effective), while the two leads are terrific. Wunmi Mosaku (Ruby on HBO’s Lovecraft Country) has a fierce sense of determination, even if her character has to defer in this traditional marriage, and Sope Dirisu keeps revealing more and more layers to the husband, a man struggling to survive under what ultimately feels like the curse of assimilation.
