'It Lives Inside' review: Running from your roots until you can't run anymore
Bishal Dutta's debut feature walks a fine line and doesn't always keep its balance.
Cultural identity is the monster in "It Lives Inside," a horror exercise that bites off a bit more than it can chew.
But co-writer and director Bishal Dutta gets points for trying and for casting a wider net than you tend to get in your everyday monster tale.
Megan Suri is Sam, a high schooler in an unidentified American town. (It could be anywhere, and that's the point.) She's of Indian origin but she rejects her heritage, which is particularly irksome to her mother, Poorna (Neeru Bajwa), who wants her to lean into her roots.
Sam just wants to fit in, and she's doing a pretty good job, even if her peers have a tendency to treat her background like an exotic gimmick. On the upside, she's gained an admirer in her popular, cute classmate Russ (Gage Marsh).
Ah but there's an odd Indian girl walking around school, looking disheveled, carrying a jar full of black muck, and Sam has to answer for her. She's Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), and while she and Sam used to be friends they went their separate ways come high school, the way that childhood friends sometimes do. Tamira is clearly in some sort of trouble but Sam wants to wash her hands of her — she doesn't need this weirdo dragging down her social clout — and during a confrontation in the locker room, she smashes the glass jar that Tamira clutches so closely.
Bad idea.
That unleashes a Pishach, a flesh eating demon known in the Hindu religion, which captures Tamira and wreaks havoc on Sam and her loved ones. In order to combat it she needs to embrace her culture, the very thing she's been running from.
That grounds "It Lives Inside" in something real, even as it goes through the monster movie mechanics and the big baddie is eventually revealed, looking like something out of a SyFy movie or a late '80s creature feature.
Dutta, making his feature film directorial debut, zeroes in on a thread of displacement and assimilation as felt through the immigrant experience, but the metaphor makes for odd bedfellows with the literal monster that is stalking around. It's a high wire act he can't fully manage, but the cultural thread does give viewers something substantive to chew on, making his tale more flesh and blood than blood and guts.
agraham@detroitnews.com
'It Lives Inside'
GRADE: C+
Rated PG-13: for terror, violent content, bloody images, brief strong language and teen drug use
Running time: 99 minutes
In theaters