‘It Lives Inside’ is a horror thriller that follows Samidha (Megan Suri), a teenager struggling with her cultural identity. Trying to fit in with her peers at school, Sam has neglected the relationship with her former best friend Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), and following a confrontation, the girls release an evil that they have to defeat.
The story unfolds to initially reveal how readily Samidha wants to fit in with her cohort, covering her beauty regiment, adjusting the filter on her photos to change her skin tone, using English as her preferred language and even shortening her name to Sam. Causing friction between Sam and her mother Poorna (Neeru Bajwa), the changes the teen has implemented allows for the film to explore the complicated feelings involved for those who relocate to a completely different country to their own, and how the next generation reacts to the environment they have been placed in.
Examining identity, ‘It Lives Inside’ explores through Sam the conflicting emotions pulling the girl in two different directions. Sam wants to assimilate and make friends at school, whilst at the same time she is faced with duty to her parents and culture. Through the soul consuming daemon Pishach Sam is faced with overcoming an impossible task of rescuing Tamira, as it has already trapped her, and facing her innermost negative thoughts and emotions.
Confusingly, after sacrificing herself and becoming a vessel for the entity, the young girl reconciles that it is her duty for life not to let the daemon escape and cause further damage. Over the course of the film, and in its conclusion particularly, it becomes harder and harder to discern between the evil entity and Sam’s heritage, as the film conveys a muddled morale regarding the teen embracing her background, whilst at the same time suffering in silence so as not to release the evil spirit.
The movie develops a tense and chilling atmosphere early on, delivering very effective visual cues to the presence of the entity, inducing suspense as to the prowess and appearance of the actual being. Ramping up the fear factor, the film does follow some predictable tropes, but establishes an excellent foreground to the final showdown by act two. Faltering after revealing the monster however, the film falls flat in its culmination, as after the daemon emerges from the shadows, it seems to become more contained and wooden, providing for a slightly stilted showdown and a bathetic culmination of the young girls journey.
The film falls victim to a few familiar and well known horror tropes. Even though it captures the struggle of being a child to immigrant parents, ‘It Lives Inside’ fails to deliver a clear and definitive conclusion regarding Sam’s identity. By showing the teen to have volunteered herself as a vessel to the daemon and enduring the struggle not to let it out, the film seems to suggest an unbearable burden as the young girl embraces her heritage. With a somewhat anticlimactic finale and a perplexing final word on the main characters’ persona, Bishal Dutta delivers a valiant effort in his feature directorial debut, presenting flashes of originality but missing the mark on a satisfying, or terrifying, ending.
Score: 2/4
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