Movie Review: It Lives Inside 

• Neon Films

A modest proposal: Can we please retire the phrase "elevated horror" forever? It emerged a few years as a way to describe a certain more art-house-friendly brand of scary movie—stuff like Robert Eggers' The Witch and Ari Aster's Hereditary—but on a more realistic level, it feels like an almost deliberately ignorant reading of the history of horror as a genre, and a way to downplay how vital that history has been.

From its very inception, horror has been allegorical and ripe with subtext, a way to explore complex subjects through the lens of fear and anxiety: grappling with the intersection between scientific inquiry and morality in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; giving shape to carnality in Bram Stoker's Dracula; understanding the capacity for evil within all of us in Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Crude, exploitative violence as a defining characteristic of the genre has been the exception rather than the rule; it makes more sense to grant thoughtful scary fare the baseline description of "horror," and refer to its ugly cousins as "degraded horror."

On that level, writer/director Bishal Dutta's It Lives Inside is no unicorn in its goals of using an unsettling supernatural premise to dig into decidedly earthbound, human ideas. It is, blessedly, one that veers from the recent tendency to make every scary movie Actually About Trauma, finding a unique perspective by turning the pressure on immigrants to assimilate culturally into a literal monster.

It's the story of Samidha (Megan Suri), an Indian-American high-school student living with her first-generation immigrant parents—tradition-minded mother Poorna (Neeru Bajwa), and more Westernized father Inesh (Vik Sahay)—in a mostly-White suburb. And as we meet her for the first time, it's clear that she's wrestling with her Indian-ness: shaving the hair off of her arms before going to school; fiddling with the filters on her selfies to change her skin tone; balking at her mother's insistence that Samidha help prepare for a Hindu religious observance. Samidha's focus is blending in with her White classmates, which means opting to be called "Sam," and separating herself from her childhood best friend and fellow Indian-American, Tamira (Mohana Krishnan).

Things start to get weird when Tamira begins walking around in a zombie-like daze while carrying a Mason jar—and when the jar breaks, thanks to Samidha's frustration, a dangerous force is unleashed. Dutta does a solid job of teasing out the nature of that force, creating a mostly-invisible menace that allows for a lower-budget production that doesn't feel like a lower-budget production. The centerpiece scenes of demonic menace maintain a PG-13 vibe but are satisfyingly creepy, benefitting from choices ranging from the orange glow of a dangerous basement, to the tension-ratcheting time that Dutta takes for Samidha to shift her eyes, and then her entire head, towards the threat she suspects is behind her.

But the reason It Lives Inside works as a narrative beyond its visceral pleasures is that Dutta understands how to build his metaphorical foundation. The story's creature, we eventually learn through the backstory of a previous victim, feeds on negative emotions, with the word "shame" dominating the diary of that aforementioned victim. It's a beast that threatens to consume her soul unless she's able to trap and feed it in other ways—and it's absolutely critical that the ritual that could accomplish that goal requires Samidha to embrace her culture's language and spirituality rather than see it as a burden, and to work together with the mother she has previously treated mostly with contempt.

There's certainly a level on which It Lives Inside exists side-by-side with some of the cheesier horror film tropes rather than presuming to stand above them; it's hardly a shock when Samidha's first romantic encounters with a boy are followed by an unpleasant aftermath. It's also a bit of a bummer that Dutta's ending feels more built to leave open the option for a sequel than to give Samidha's story a thematically satisfying resolution. Mostly, however, this is a smart, stylishly-executed scary movie with an understanding for how tales of suspense and shock can allow us to dig into all the things that make our lives feel unsettled. For that kind of journey, there's no elevator required.