SECRETS DON'T MAKE FRIENDS
★★★☆☆ (Good for One Viewing)
Director: Patrick Kack-Brice
2021
How well do you know your friends? This question fuels the killer’s motivations in There’s Someone Inside Your House, a teen slasher film whose title brings to mind Richard Peck’s Are You in the House Alone? and every movie ever inspired by “The Babysitter” urban legend. What makes There’s Someone stand out in the chasm of endless horror flicks being churned out by the day is its unique premise, and a murderer who has made masks of all his/her victims so they can see themselves right before they shuffle off this mortal coil. There’s a reason one must gaze upon their face as a final act of contrition; some of the teenagers’ secrets are so vile, the audience may have a hard time not rooting for the bad guy. At least in the beginning.
SPOILERS The movie starts out with two kills that only appear to be connected by the secret lives the victims were living. The unfortunate football player once committed a heinous act of hazing, and the other doomed high-schooler would have been a really big hit at a party in antebellum Georgia circa 1850. The killer wears a mask of their faces as he wields his/her knife, and during the murders, photos of the victims’ indiscretions are sent to the entire town via text. Filled with conflict as I watched Footballer and Aryan Amy die, I thought of what Chris Rock famously said: “I’m not saying he should have killed her… but I understand.”
Meanwhile, we are slowly being being introduced to our heroine. Makani (Sydney Park) is the new girl at cornfield adjacent Osborne High School, but she’s already been accepted by a tight circle of eccentrics that include pill-popping Rodrigo and NASA enthusiast Darby. Little do Makani’s new pals know that she’s carrying a terrible burden. Memories of a past crime she committed weigh heavy on her mind because she believes she would be shunned by the community if they knew. Makani is an amiable girl who helps her forgetful grandma, so it’s hard for us to imagine her doing something so horrible, but part of the frightening fun is knowing that her former bad girl behavior puts her on the killer’s radar. She should be scared, there are some truly terrifying deaths in There’s Someone Inside Your House. Imagine waking up from a nap and realizing the killer came into your room to steal your cellphone so you couldn’t call for help.
A mysterious past is not the only thing Makani is hiding from her crew of misanthropes. We find out she had a covert connection over the summer with Ollie, the creepiest kid at the school and the number one suspect for everyone, including Makani. Hey, if Scream taught us anything, it’s to never trust the person you’re knocking boots with in a horror film. We don’t have a ton of characters to pin the murders on, so you can probably spot the killer from a mile away. Unfortunately, There’s Someone Inside Your House drops the ball towards the middle, when people are slashed outside their titular homes for unknown reasons. The entire premise— the movie’s greatest strength—falls apart in a rush to the finish line; bodies are scattered in cornfields and a football player is skewered in a school as if the movie got bored with details. This is also around the time our alliances go from grey to black and white. Park’s muted performance gives the film levity instead of just a scream queen, but in the final battle, we should have been conflicted about who loses. The movie set ’em up and didn’t let us knock ’em down. After that well-crafted lore in the first and second act, what should have been an amazing final battle between our good guy and Face Killer—who went after some real scum in the first scenes—turns into a You Go Girl moment of ridiculous monologuing, with a happy milestone montage at the end that was so saccharine, I half expected to hear Green’s Day’s “Time of Your Life” playing in the background.
Yes, the movie winds up going for the low-hanging fruit, but it’s still worth a look. There’s no harm in reminding teen viewers that what they do in the years that their brains are half-cooked can haunt them for the rest of their lives. Hands down, There’s Someone Inside Your House’s power lies in making the audience feel an emotion they don’t normally feel when watching horror that isn’t focused on revenge: guilt for thinking that some of the victims weren’t exactly innocent. This inner turmoil, and Park’s delicate performance, are good enough reasons to dive into Netflix’s newest horror offering. There are definitely worse ways to spend a night alone in your house.
GENRES: Diverse Characters, Feminist-Friendly, LGBTQ+, Serial Killer, Teens in Peril
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