Are you curious to know what EXACTLY happened in the film His House? Read the complete plot analysis : Past, Conflict and Resolution of the 2020 Psychological-Horror, Oscar Nominated film — His House.
Synopsis —
A refugee couple from South Sudan experiences inexplicable incidents in their newly allocated house in the UK. They need to understand, & then resolve it for in order to stay in the house/country.
Plot, Conflict & Resolution
Bol and Rial escapes from a war-torn region in South Sudan with their daughter Nagyak. They had to take a ride in an overcrowded motorboat through the precarious English channel where they lose their daughter along with many others too. After three months in one of the British detention centres, they got the approval to stay on the British soil but under probational asylum in harshly restricted regulations. Under it, they provided Bol and Rial with a shabby house with peeling walls, in the outskirts of London. Both of them promised Mark, the supervision officer that they will do anything to fit in, and abide by the rules, that will prove to be a good Britisher.
At this point Bol and Rial seem stable, and spirited to restart their life, burying the grief of their daughter’s death. The story has reached a point where something completely new has happened. The journey from escaping their hometown to sleeping in their house in London with not-so-enough weekly wages has proven for them to be a very drastic change with a sense of overwhelmed satisfaction. This looks like a perfect point to put in front the first card of the game, and that’s what Remi Weekes learnt too.
Bol and Rial goes to sleep in the hall, and inexplicably Bol wakes up. He listens humming sound coming from the adjacent room. He follows the sound and becomes suspicious of someone’s presence behind the walls. Here starts the series of treacherous incidents that starts haunting Bol every night. Every night he would listen the voices, taps and thumping sounds form behind the walls. He tore apart the entire peeling of the walls to find out seepages and inconclusive marks. Rial also witnesses the same, but very soon realises that they are being followed by an apeth or a witch. Rial tells a situational anecdote to Bol, in which a thief in the village accidentally stole from an apeth, and later when he built his house, the apeth bewitched the house and haunted him. Rial warned him, that they are followed by an apeth evidently, and they will have to repay the debt they have taken. Unclear even after Rial’s exposition, Bol runs and burns everything related to their daughter.
Here comes the second layer of conflict in Bol’s life which he is gonna ultimately transmit to Rial’s life too. Bol is strongly trying to fit in the British society. He has gotten hair cuts, and even has changed his dressing sense. While eating he sits on the chair and uses cutleries instead of hands. Whereas, Rial remains still the same. Now, either he has to run back to his hometown or he gotta win over this apeth anyhow.
“We are the good ones. We are not going back.”
The apeth kept tormenting Bol, and Bol kept digging and drilling the walls in bits. He concludes that if he’d change the house then maybe he could get rid of this witch. He reaches out to Mark, requesting him to help him get shifted to a new house, as there are big rats littering and damaging the house. Mark comes down with an officer at Bol’s place for an inquiry, and finds big holes in the walls with shattered peelings. He dismisses the request and warns Bol of an immediate deportment. Rial comes into the scene and tells the officers about the witch, and how Bol is tackling her using a hammer all the nights.
This is the point where Bol’s overwhelmed satisfaction becomes scarce and in anguish he dares the apeth to talk face to face. The apeth emerges lucidly and calls Bol a thief, asking him to sacrifice a life in return for Nagyak’s life which Bol had wrongly stolen from her. Bol realises that Apeth can not touch him, it is all visual and dares the apeth to come and kill him. In anguish, Bol mentally goes to an unknown dimension where he finds himself drowning in an ocean of dead people. Scared from this catatonia, he tries locking Rial in a room, but she manages to escape out from a window and unexpectedly finds herself back in Sudan in a familiar classroom.
This supposedly has to be the next layer of conflict. What has exactly happened? Is Rial experiencing a supernatural phenomenon or is she experiencing a mental trip which the director is cinematically trying to express. And, if she is here then why is she here? How is this suppose to resolve the ongoing conflicts in her and Bo’s life. Remi Weekes has brought up an extraordinary style of narrating the mental tension in Rial’s and Bol’s life, and the guilt trip they are experiencing since they have done wrong to Nagyak.
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