A beautiful Indian American teen, Samidha (Megan Suri), just wants to fit in with her suburban classmates in the new horror It Lives Inside. But there’s a demon at large and it’s not hormones or puberty — it’s a literal monster that will maim and kill you and anyone who tries to help in this grisly, if imperfect, metaphor for the immigrant experience.
It’s the feature debut of Bishal Dutta, who co-wrote the film with Ashish Mehta, and crafts an effectively menacing PG-13 rated nail-biter centered around the interesting and conflicting dynamics of an Indian American family. The mom, Poorna (Neeru Bajwa) is determined to keep up with the traditions of the country they left behind. Samidha — sorry, Sam — would rather not, which her dad supports, in theory. She shaves her arms in the morning and posts a Kardashian-level selfie with a carefully chosen filter. She “forgets” the lunch her mother has packed her. She resents the Indian customs and holidays that prevent her from hanging out with the cute guy in her class. And she’s cast aside her old best friend, a fellow Indian American named Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), hoping that maybe she can just blend in and not be the “Indian girl” anymore. Essentially, she’s a normal teen, through and through.
Unfortunately for Sam, Tamira has gotten pretty weird. Her childhood friend skulks around school like a ghost, hidden behind a curtain of unbrushed hair and cradling a cloudy Mason jar like her life depended on it — not exactly the kind of person that an aspiring popular girl wants on her resume. And it just gets worse because, naturally, IT does live inside that Mason jar and that Mason jar is unable to withstand a fall to the floor. Oops.
Dutta gets your heartrate going off the bat, with a creepy prologue as screams flood out of a normal suburban house, but Sam’s descent into one of the haunted never quite finds a suitable or consistent tone. It’s all moody, wide-eyed paranoia with Stranger Things vibes that’s occasionally interrupted by run-of-the-mill jump-scares and demonic nightmare visions. It’ll startle and spook, but it also doesn’t feel incredibly original, which is an odd failure for a story that has chosen to focus on a very original threat.
