There’s Someone Inside Your House: A Complicated Viewing Experience
The Movie Has Lots Of Topics It Wants To Address
There’s Someone Inside Your House initially got my attention because of that title. It’s almost hilariously blunt. The most standard slasher scenario reduced to a single sentence. And, true to its word, many scenes have characters in their house with a murderer.
This is also a movie about people’s dark secrets. And that’s where we really start this review. The secrets are things like characters being racist (warning: you do hear some of the hate speech) or having assaulted someone. Slashers are not known for shying away from upsetting subject matters, but There’s Someone Inside Your House is a movie that revolves around plot details like that. It’s, lacking a better description, a core conceit.
There’s Someone Inside Your House Has A Theme
It’s also a film that seeks to modernize the slasher subgenre. I can’t speak to a lot of the representation’s accuracy (and other related things), but I can present aspects of the film for you to judge if you’ll have any interest in watching it. There’s Someone Inside Your House has likable LGBTQIA+ characters. The genderfluid character gets dead-named, amongst other things, by a bigoted character. It has a complex and interesting Black main character. The murderer (who’s not Black) also wears a face mask of a Black character. The movie seems to want to skirt around a lot of familiar tropes associated with slashers and horror overall. There’s the stereotypical “romantically/sexually active character dies” trope played—as far as I can tell—pretty much stock standard.
So, there’s all of that to think about. Beyond that stuff, this is a typical slasher movie. It has the rhythm you would expect, with gory kills happening every few scenes. Overall, There’s Someone Inside Your House is a breezy movie, moving through plot points, setting up red herrings, misdirecting, and mentioning its theme occasionally. I didn’t guess the killer correctly, but if you’re more genre-savvy, you might find the mystery dull.
It Underlying Plot Structure Is Mostly Bog-Standard
If you’re still debating, we can also talk about the gore. Slashers as a subgenre exist primarily for creative kills and tension. And There’s Someone Inside Your House has a few standout moments. Especially early into the runtime, I shouted in alarm at how brutal the kills were. The murderer primarily uses a knife, but it’s cinematographically creative with that limitation. The movie earns its MA rating without relying on gimmicks for its murder scenes.
I also must compliment the actors. The characters meant to be unlikable are extremely unlikeable, and our main friend group has a good sense of camaraderie. Makani (played by Sydney Park) and Ollie (played by Théodore Pellerin) have cute chemistry and have some of the best dialogue scenes. Similarly, Alex (played by Asjha Cooper) and Rodrigo (played by Diego Josef) have a few emotionally complex, well-acted moments (both together and apart) that made me wish they had more to do in the plot. Darby (played by Jesse LaTourette) is in a similar situation, with them falling out of the story for a while and feeling sidelined (alongside Asjha) when the climax needed to happen. It’s nice to see Makani’s plotline so cleanly wrapped up, and the hospital scene was wholesome, but it would’ve been nice to see similar happen for more characters with equal narrative gravitas. Perhaps I’m spoiled by the flood of mini-series we get now, but it felt like so many interesting characters shoved into too small a box for us to understand them.
The Characters Would Benefit From More Runtime
As I said earlier, I think with There’s Someone Inside Your House, you’ll have to weigh what you’re willing to watch. Horror usually is comfort media for the macabre-aligned, jolt fodder for the thrill-seeker, or brain food for fans of social commentary. There’s Someone Inside Your House seems to want to be all those things, switching rapidly from scene to scene. Though I haven’t read it, the internet claims the book differs significantly from the movie, so if you like parts of this premise and aspects of this story, maybe you’ll find a better version within those pages. The movie form is such a jumble of elements that ultimately isn’t all that memorable outside the specific things I mentioned. It’s got a lot of the generic, popcorn-film slasher formula in its bones. Personally, if I were in a social-commentary slasher mood, I’d just queue up the Fear Street trilogy again.
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