FrightFest 2023: It Lives Inside Grapples with Demons & Cultural Identity
Bishal Dutta leaves a mark with his feature-length directorial debut.
Director Bishal Dutta tangles the weeds of loneliness and cultural identity, allowing the characters to live and breathe apart from the impending doom. Characters are drawn with full vitality, and even before the pin-eyed entity shows up, there’s enough friction to get the motors running. It Lives Inside standardizes demonic powers, harnessing both tropes and fresh soil, to entice the audience to stick around for 90 minutes. It’s not particularly inventive, yet it possesses enough bite to draw blood.
Indian-American teen Samidha (Megan Suri) struggles with wanting to fit in and holding onto her cultural heritage. Her mother Poorna (Neeru Bajwa) begrudges her for seemingly abandoning her roots and swapping out her native tongue for American vernacular. Generational beliefs are at odds, playing into Samidha’s (or Sam, as she’s called) suffocating loneliness. She just wants to be liked, free to explore herself within the confines of the high school hierarchy. When she comes to blows with her childhood best friend Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), a strange young girl who eats lunch under the bleachers, she accidentally unleashes a charcoal-black figure who feeds on flesh, souls, and sadness.
As Sam’s family prepares for Puja Day, a celebration of the goddess Durga, Tamira goes missing. Sam, the last person to see her before her disappearance, discovers a leatherbound text, which contains Hindu prayers, scribbles (“keep it inside” and “trap it” are two phrases scrawled within its pages), and wildly disturbing portraits of ghosts and a fang-toothed demon. It’s disturbing enough on its own, but when Sam tracks down a dead young boy’s house, she discovers even more grisly paintings. Her teacher Joyce (Betty Gabriel) assists in uncovering the truth behind the drawings, indicating that the force, whatever it is, dates back centuries. What results next is a race against time, as the flesh-hungry hellhound circles around Sam and threatens her life and those she loves.
It Lives Inside leans into conventions but supplies plenty of spooky scares, one of which is ripped straight out of Insidious (you know the one). One especially violent slaying makes for must-see entertainment, even if much of the film around it is a tired retread. As his feature-length directorial debut, Bishal Dutta leaves a mark – his work shows great promise as a visual storyteller that hypnotizes as much as it does completely drain you (in the best way possible). It Lives Inside doesn’t reinvent the genre, but it makes for suitable viewing if you’re thirsting for a demonic tale.
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