It Lives Inside
NEONThis piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.
Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Bishal Dutta’s It Lives Inside has interesting ideas and images. It also contains a terrific lead performance from Megan Suri as Samidha (though she likes to be called Sam), a high school student who gets increasingly worried by her former friend Tamira’s (Mohana Krishnan) behavior after she tells her a demon is trapped inside a jar she is holding. Believing she is crazy, Sam breaks the jar but invertedly wakes up the demon inside, known as the Pishach, which latches onto Tamira and shortly Sam.
In 99 minutes, Dutta’s film goes through multiple themes, including one’s identity and heritage being the most important. Sam is of Indian descent but rejects it to fit into the American culture. This increases the tension between herself and her mother (Neeru Bajwa), who insists on speaking Hindi and respecting well-established traditions. At the same time, Sam’s father (Vik Sahay) believes she should be free to do what she wants. Some of the more emotional scenes occur with Sam’s mother, though they get increasingly tiresome by the time the film progresses.
The audience immediately grasps how Sam’s relationship with her mother is souring, but Dutta consistently repeats these sequences as if no one got it the first time. The latter-half scenes deepen their relationship, but it takes so long before the two characters seriously open up and expand on their arc without any familiar dramatic clichés. The relationship between Sam’s teacher (Betty Gabriel) and American friend (Gage Marsh) also doesn’t help. Of course, her teacher doesn’t believe in anything she says about the Pishach – until something happens to her – while her friend is relegated to the underdeveloped “horror movie boyfriend” trope.
Dutta doesn’t do anything new with those arcs, and it’s a shame that they feel so familiar because the performances from all actors are excellent, particularly Suri in the most impressive role of her career. Sam’s arc complexifies itself as the movie progresses, and it gets even more challenging for her when she sees visions of the Pishach in her dreams, unable to discern what is real and what isn’t. Dutta represents Sam’s descent into madness with incredible visual flair, but that part of the film wouldn’t have been as solid as it is were it not for Suri giving her all at every turn.
Some of It Lives Inside’s horror sequences are also tiring, especially the ones where it was all a dream. It is fine to represent this once in a film, especially when the creature specifically haunts an individual’s dream. However, Dutta does it so often in this film that it sadly dampens the emotional impact of any subsequent scene, as it could be a dream at any turn. At some point, Dutta stops doing so, and that’s where It Lives Inside starts to shine the most.
Without giving anything away, the film’s final act contains some of the scariest images released in any horror movie this year. The bathroom scene featuring Sam’s teacher contains the most terrifying uses of mirrors and lights of the year. Dutta and cinematographer Matthew Lynn knew exactly what they were doing when they equipped the teacher’s bathroom with a timed light. The teacher plays with the object for so long that the ultimate reveal of who is in the bathroom produces the most potent creature image out there.
When the creature gets fully revealed, it’s a tad underwhelming. It may be when audiences will be the most divided as the film takes its biggest storytelling swing. However, It Lives Inside wraps itself up with an ending that feels far more terrifying than it should and a prescient warning on mankind’s relationship with the otherworldly. Whatever anyone believes, it’s best to leave anything beyond any sense of scientific understanding alone.
It's a shame that the film takes a long time to get going, and most character arcs are relegated to tired clichés that the overall experience of It Lives Inside is mixed. However, its climax is so spectacular that it’s almost a miracle the film doesn’t falter by the time it ends, which would’ve likely been the case had Dutta not filled it with so many powerful images. By the time the credits roll, no one will have the same opinion on its ending and visual storytelling. Some may love it, others won’t, but one thing’s for sure: no one will leave It Lives Inside with a feeling of indifference, even if the finished product itself isn’t perfect.