Still a striking beauty at 78, Prentiss has little to do but look scared and confused, while Bob Balaban provides reliably deadpan comic relief. Perkins also pays wry homage to his father, who makes a fleeting cameo on a flickering TV screen. The director has jokingly described I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House as a reunion for the cast of Catch-22, which co-starred Prentiss, Balaban and his father. Summary A young nurse, Lily (Ruth Wilson), moves in to a secluded old house to care for an elderly, reclusive horror novelist. Ultimately, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is not a movie for everyone.
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Scenes of Polly herself are interspersed throughout the film, but she never speaks except for the occasional voiceover. The end is never given “in order to be true to the subject, to Polly,” and it becomes clear that Ms. Blum was herself haunted by Polly, who presumably never gave her the ending. The inability to see the ending (death) is what the opening monologue claims confines ghosts to their haunts.
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It stars Ruth Wilson as a live-in nurse who suspects her elderly employer's house may be haunted, and also features Paula Prentiss in her first major film role in 30 years. Actor turned director Osgood Perkins pays sly homage to his famous father Anthony in this Toronto-launched ghost story, a debut star vehicle for Ruth Wilson. As the stories of each woman blur together, a new meaning behind the title of Iris' famous novel (and Polly's allegedly true story), The Lady in the Wall, emerges. Each of them imprisoned, the women are terrified yet desperate to reach out and connect with one another.
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Like the opening shot depicting a spectral woman in white gliding across the screen, elusive yet pleading, the film proves impossible to pin down. But what it holds back in terms of concrete meaning it makes up for with an effervescent sense of things. Because, sure, every plot point and character remains at arms length and out of focus, but that only makes them more piercing.
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And that’s what makes it so perfect; those small moments that feel like mammoth rewards, the ways in which Perkins makes the viewer work for gratification. The batty scribe keeps calling the nurse Polly, who is in fact a character from one of Blum’s most popular novels. Lily reads said book and becomes lost in its narrative, the likes of which is realized for us in some effective asides, and soon, what’s happening on page begins to affect what’s happening in the real world. In many ways, “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House” feels more like a first film than “February” in that its ambitions sometimes feel a bit out of reach for the final product. It’s something that might have worked even better as a short film or an episode of an anthology series, as one can feel it stretching to meet a short running time.
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But if you're looking for horror movies pushing the cinematic boundaries of the genre -- and a spooky experience that inspires more awe than fright -- just try giving it ten minutes of your life. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House might best be understood as The Witch meets The Hours. Writer-director Osgood Perkins, previously known for his debut film festival-darling The Blackcoat’s Daughter (AKA February), employs a tantalizing, maddening kind of minimalism while exploring a story of all-encompassing breadth. In 1812, the blindfolded Polly uses her hands to feel her surroundings, coming across a wall that has been stripped of its boards - the same section where mold is growing in present day. Polly raises her blindfold and sees the hole, locking eyes with her husband in confusion. Her husband suddenly bludgeons her to death with a hammer and hides her body behind the wall.
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On Lily's first night in the house, the telephone is wrenched out of her hands by an unseen force. A spot of black mold appears on the wall and slowly grows as the months pass. Lily often finds a corner of the rug at the base of the stairs has been flipped up, but she is the only person in the house who walks on the first floor.
‘I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House’: Film Review TIFF 2016
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The voice belongs to Lily (Ruth Wilson), a neurotic young nurse who has been hired to care for ageing horror novelist Iris Bloom (Prentiss) in her eerily remote home in rural Massachusetts. There is a pleasing symmetry to the fact that Osgood Perkins, son of Psycho star Anthony, has recently emerged as a writer-director of high-class horror movies. One of the buzzy premieres at last year’s TIFF was his debut feature February, a blood-chilling shocker about a killing spree at an all-girls school.
Because every woman is caught in this purgatory between life and death. In the kitchen, Lily briefly hallucinates that her arms have become bloated and covered in black mold spots. That evening, she spots the reflection of the figure dressed in white standing in the room but when she turns, no one is there. Inside are rough drafts for "The Lady in the Walls." She comes to believe that the novel may not be fictitious but rather depicts an actual murder committed in the house.
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is a 2016 horror film, directed and written by Oz Perkins. Lily Saylor (Ruth Wilson), a hospice nurse, moves in with a retired horror story author named Iris Blum (Paula Prentiss). Given the eerie and mysterious nature of both the house and Iris, Lily suspects something sinister has occurred. After being hired to care for Iris Bloom (Paula Prentiss), a reclusive author well past her prime, Lily is hung out to dry. In an effort to humanise her, Perkins (who also wrote the screenplay) has her cry on the phone while opening up to a friend about a man who left her. But as far as characterisation goes, that’s all Perkins affords his lead.
I will never be 29 years old.” We hear this in voiceover, although Wilson’s eyes break the fourth wall, staring directly at camera. The omniscient narration that knows its own death, the character who draws us in with her eyes before she’s even spoken—Perkins is playing games with structure and filmmaking. He’s confronting us directly and beginning a sort of circular logic to the film, one in which the dead, the living, and the about-to-die intersect, and we are drawn into the center of this intersection. Credit juggernaut streaming service Netflix for giving Perkins the resources and long leash to create such a personal, obsessive work. Pretty Thing premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last week and it’s a film almost pornographic in its portent, every second of it seductive and ripe with tension, promising money shots that never come.
In the second, it could be a blurred hand, but the first offers no such explanation. I have heard myself say that a house with a death in it can never again be bought or sold by the living. It can only be borrowed from the ghosts who have stayed behind…. They have stayed to look back for a glimpse of the very last moments of their lives but the memories of their own deaths are faces on the wrong side of wet windows, smeared by rain, impossible to properly see.
However, it’s a short story that I immediately started again, already getting more out of the first act than I did the first time. It’s a movie that’s too opaque and unusual for some viewers, but those who do give in to its unique rhythms and approach will find something often haunting and ultimately rewarding. Shortly after that killer opening line, our protagonist Lily Saylor (Ruth Wilson) drops another bombshell when she reveals that she’ll be dead within a year. Osgood Perkins’ “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House” is an atmospheric take on the haunted house flick that works more with dread and the looming specter of death than the traditional tropes that often define the genre. Sure, there are a couple of moments to make you gasp, but Perkins is working in a more circular, dreamlike manner. The whole film takes place in the house at the end of Teacup Road in Braintree, Massachusetts, and this house is haunted.
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