Genre: Drama-Horror
Premise: A married pair of Sudanese refugees are granted a temporary stay in the UK that can become permanent if they can only avoid trouble, a task that becomes problematic when they move into a haunted house.
About: This project was held up for awhile due to a snafu with The Weinstein Company. But since there is no Weinstein Company anymore, they can finally make their film! Remi Weekes is a first time writer-director who’s made some noise around the UK with a couple of short films. This script made the Blood List last year.
Writer: Remi Weekes
Details: 93 pages
This one came recommended from a couple of sources so I was eager to check it out. I like scripts – especially genre scripts – that are able to take me to places I’ve never been before. This story about Sudanese refugees stuck in a haunted house felt refreshingly original. So all the arrows were pointing up on this one. Let’s find out if those arrows didn’t die of a heart attack due to a Scriptshadow jump scare.
When we meet Sudanese married couple Bol and Zainab, both 28, they’re sleeping in a detention center with hundreds of other refugees, all from different countries. The couple has escaped unimaginable horror in their home-country, Sudan, where villagers were being hacked to pieces on a daily basis.
The two win the equivalent of the lottery when they’re chosen for a six-month program to live in the UK. It’s made clear to them that they are not citizens until they finish the program without causing any trouble. They’re ecstatic. Being good for 6 months? A piece of cake.
The two are moved into a house in a blue-collar neighborhood and while the neighbors don’t seem very friendly, they feel lucky to have a home. And everything goes well for awhile. That is until Zainab starts seeing something around the house. A… creature. A creature that lives in the walls.
At first, Bol tells Zainab to tough it out. She can’t be going crazy on him. They could lose the house and get sent back to the hostels. But the truth is, Bol has begun seeing the creature as well. He keeps telling himself it’s a part of his imagination but deep down he knows it’s not.
During this time, we learn that the couple lost a daughter on the journey out of Sudan. The loss haunts Zainab. But Bol is over it. And he wants his wife to get over it too. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to link the creature living in the house with their lost daughter. The two are obviously connected. But if you dare think you know what the creature wants, guess again.
His House is the kind of script you get when you have a writer-director who’s better at the directing side than the writing side. Clearly, Weekes has a vision for this film, some of which he charts specifically in the script, as he tells you exactly where the camera will be placed and how it moves.
We also get plenty of amazing visuals here, such as Bol walking across the ocean in a dream, and then when we pan up and look down to see that the ocean is filled with billions of dead bodies to signify his countryman lost in the war.
But when it comes to the writing, there are a lot of problems with His House, the biggest of which is that very little happens. That’s because the story is thinner than a Blumhouse budget breakdown. And a lot of basic screenwriting mistakes are made.
For example, the characters have nothing to do. They just hang around the house waiting for the writer to come up with the next scary scene for them to participate in. Occasionally, Bol will leave for the day, but we have no idea where he goes. In any script, you want your characters to be active. You want them doing things, affecting the outside world. Both of these characters are passive and it makes for a very bland experience.
The dialogue is frustrating. There are no conversations in this script. Only conversation fragments. If two people speak, it’s for less than 30 seconds. And when characters do speak, they often use as few words as possible. “What is this?” “It’s the best I can do.” “This is wonderful.” “Wonderful.” “But maybe next time we can use the table.”
The reason this is problematic is because we leave tons of conversations feeling like nothing was accomplished, nothing was said. It’s as if conversations are only there to fill up space. I understand being understated and avoiding on-the-nose conversation. But you can go too far in the opposite direction, to the extent that words are noise. They mean nothing. And there were too many times here where that happened.
It’s also important to remember that there are two kinds of “not a lot happens” stories. There’s the good kind. And there’s the boring kind. You have to know the difference. Just putting two characters in a quiet scene to pass the time isn’t going to keep readers invested. Contrast this with A Quiet Place, whose concept is so powerful that even a quiet family game of monopoly can be heart-pounding, since we know that, at any second, someone can make a mistake and they’ll all be dead.
To be honest, I had so given up on this script by the time it hit the third act that I had to prop my head up with a series of pillows. But then something crazy happens. His House becomes a movie.
And what do you know? It’s because we leave that boring house and jump back to the Sudan run, where Bol and Zainab escape the country. It’s a harrowing sequence and all I could think about while reading it was, “Why isn’t THIS the movie?”
It also leads us to the big twist in the film (spoilers moving forward), where we’re watching these two make a run for it and we’re wondering, where is this daughter they kept crying about? She’s nowhere to be found. Then, as they’re approaching the last UN bus, which won’t let them on, Bol sees an abandoned little girl nearby, grabs her, and uses her to convince the bus to take them.
Later on, during a difficult part of the journey, they don’t really need the girl anymore and so they kind of let her go, which they suspect will lead to her death. So that’s the reason there’s this devil creature in the house. It’s punishing them for what they’ve done.
It’s a nice twist and a strong ending. Unfortunately, no matter how much I liked it, it couldn’t make up for the 70 prior pages where I could barely stay awake. It’ll be interesting to see how this movie does and if the director’s vision can blind audiences to the script’s problems. Then again, maybe they’ve improved the script since then. I hope so because this idea is unique and has potential.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I know a script is in trouble when storylines are introduced then forgotten. That tells me the writer isn’t committed to his ideas. The script starts out with the neighbors bothering our couple, but then that gets kicked to the background before never being mentioned agin. Ultimately, it had nothing to do with the story anyway. So if you’re thinking about introducing a subplot into your script, either commit to it, or get rid of it completely. There’s nothing worse than a subplot stuck in no-man’s-land.
