His House

I feel like I slept on this one for too long. "His House" is a horror movie from 2020 that’s miles away from your average haunted house flick. A Sudanese refugee couple gets relocated to a run-down council house in England, but it turns out they’ve brought something with them. The setup is familiar, but right away the film does something clever with the horror: it’s not just about spooky bumps in the night, but about trauma, displacement, and guilt. It uses real-world pain as fuel for what’s haunting the characters, and that gives it a raw punch a lot of horror movies miss.

The scares? Legitimately eerie. Director Remi Weekes keeps things unsettling with some of the creepiest visuals I’ve seen in a while. The way shadows linger or flicker where they shouldn’t, and the sound design—constant tapping, low groans, the creaking of the house itself—feels designed to keep you on edge. There’s one sequence in the living room that had me tense the whole time, and it works not by jump scares, but by pure, thick atmosphere.

What I did not expect was how much heart this film has. Sope Dirisu and Wunmi Mosaku just kill it as the leads. Their performances are quietly devastating, especially as the husband tries to sweep things under the rug, while his wife refuses to let reality be rewritten. You just buy into them as a married couple with way too much weighing on their shoulders, and their conflicts feel sharp, not melodramatic.

The pacing is pretty tight for a movie that juggles so many themes. It never gets bogged down in metaphor, but sometimes, I did wish for a bit more digging into the supernatural rules. Some questions go unanswered, and while that keeps it mysterious, it left me wanting a bit more connective tissue to really blow my mind.

Visually, the film is strong. The house has this battered, almost cavernous look that makes ordinary spaces unsettling. The moments that dip into surrealism, with water seeping into the walls or memories intruding in ghostly ways, look amazing and really stick with you after the credits. It’s a film obsessed with what you can and can’t escape, and that comes through in every grimy, rain-soaked shot.

The only downside is that its ambitions slightly outpace its runtime. By the ending, some threads feel a little rushed, like the film is sprinting to make its thematic point. It’s clever and impactful, but I would’ve loved a little more time for it to breathe. Still, it hits hard, both as horror and as a story about refugees balancing the past and present in a place that doesn’t exactly welcome them.