93 min | NR | October 30, 2020 | Netflix
A South Sudanese couple survives the boat crossing and lands in a crumbling council house on the edge of England. The asylum system tells them to assimilate and be grateful. The thing that followed them across the water has other plans.
Bol and Rial Majur flee war in South Sudan and arrive in England as asylum seekers. The state places them in a dilapidated house on a bleak estate and orders them to obey the rules of their probation. They cannot work. They cannot move. They must prove they belong by erasing who they were. Remi Weekes uses the haunted-house frame to make a sharper argument. The horror is not just the witch in the walls. It is the demand that refugees bury their dead and their guilt to earn a place that does not want them.
Sope Dirisu plays Bol as a man desperate to convert. He buys English clothes, sings along to football chants, and insists they will be the good kind of immigrant. Dirisu lets the cracks show as the house works on him. Wunmi Mosaku plays Rial with a stillness that holds the whole film together. She refuses to pretend the past did not happen, and Mosaku makes that refusal look like both strength and self-destruction. The marriage between them carries a secret, and the actors play every scene with the weight of what neither will say out loud.
Weekes directs his first feature and also writes it, and he builds the scares out of architecture. The walls of the house open into impossible spaces, and the production design treats the holes in the plaster as wounds. Cinematographer Jo Willems shoots the interiors in sickly amber and shadow, then floods the war flashbacks with hard daylight that hurts to look at. The sound design buries whispers and scratching under the hum of the failing house. Matt Smith appears as the case worker Mark, all hollow English politeness, and the film treats his casual cruelty as its own kind of haunting.
The film works best when it lets the metaphor and the monster occupy the same frame. The witch demands a debt, and the debt is the life the Majurs traded for their survival. Weekes does not separate the supernatural from the political because they are the same problem. The closing turn lands the idea cleanly. You carry your house with you, and the dead come with it.