I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (Osgood Perkins)

[Stay Puft]

I AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE
Dir. Osgood Perkins



IMDb page

[Stay Puft]

I couldn't find a thread? I could be blind. (Netflix Originals don't seem like much of a Match Cut thing, anyways.)

The house here reminded me a bit of my grandma's house, so I was initially hooked. I could have watched Ruth Wilson walk around a creepy old home for 90 minutes and been satisfied. But, there's a story. And a backstory. And a story within a story. And a mystery? (But a half-hearted one at that.) Everything is thinly sketched, the details/answers trite and never less than obvious. The jump scares are predictable. As both a mood piece and a narrative, it crumbles into nothing.

Insert a Rowland shrug here.

[Peng]

Out of Osgood Perkins' first three films, this has the lowest average letterboxd score, so I hope it's not too pretentious to say that what makes it my favorite is precisely how it feels like the purest distillation of his directorial voice so far. The more bare-bone, single-location ghost story provides the best basis for his style, unencumbered by the first one's occult timeline-scrambling parallel threads or the third's fairy-tale arc enhancement. In this more limited scope, there is little to interrupt Perkins' claustrophobic placidity and pervasive atmosphere of whispery dread, further enhanced by Ruth Wilson's old-timey mannerism and the narration's wonderfully affected, intricate Southern gothic literary voice. Opens with a dedication to the director's late father, and there's some external poignancy to see later in the film a TV showing Anthony Perkins in Friendly Persuasion, watched by the actor's friend and colleague Paula Prentiss -- another specter of the gone-by past hovering over this house. 7/10