There's Someone Inside Your House movie review (2021)

June 2024 · 2 minute read

Still, the most frustrating thing about “There’s Someone Inside Your House” has to be the gulf between its characters’ stated qualities and their actual behavior. Chipper and cruel student council leader Katie (Sarah Dugdale) gets stalked and dispatched in an early kill scene set in a church, which suggests that the filmmakers are more interested in plot twists than character development. And honestly, Katie’s not much more of a character than, say, Makani, whose main appeal stems from her barely considered past.

Makani spends much of the movie walking on eggshells, trying to distance herself from a revealing trauma, but also keeping her and Ollie’s relationship something of a secret (though they make out in his car a couple of times). Park’s certainly charismatic enough to carry her scenes, and for a while it’s easy to follow Makani as she struggles to keep a low profile. But there’s not much to Makani beyond Park’s suggestive performance, least of all Makani’s threadbare and mostly implied relationship with her sleepwalking grandma (BJ Harrison), or her cute, but unremarkable thing with Ollie.

Like Katie, Makani pushes the plot further along, and gives a little more weight to a story outline that never stops telling you what it’s about: a varied community of alienated teenagers, defined as they supposedly are by their ability to choose when and what they can share about themselves. Too bad all the haves are mustache-twirling caricatures and all the have-nots are indistinct place-holders.

Maybe this is a product of the movie’s nature as an adaptation, but there’s never really a moment in “There’s Someone Inside Your House” that suggests its protagonists are real enough to be worth rooting for. They talk a lot about hiding their true selves from each other, but often don’t seem human enough to be credibly shallow.

Now available on Netflix.

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