Director Jerren Lauder has levelled up his directing skills considerably since his debut feature, Stay Out of the F**king Attic from 2020. Sure, the jump-scares, body-hopping demons and gore-letting represent the usual dime-store theatrics you expect from low-budget scare-’em-ups. But there’s a lot more finesse here in the telling of the backstory, as well as an unsettling moody soundtrack by Sanford Parker, and a sense of menace lurking around every corner in the bland suburban setting; together it evokes indie “elevated horror” features such as It Follows. But the component that really kicks The Inhabitant up a notch is the lead performance from young Odessa A’zion, who is insanely watchable as Tara, a troubled teenager in her final year of high school living with her lower-middle-class parents, Emily (Leslie Bibb) and Ben (Dermot Mulroney), in Fall River, Massachussetts.
Fans of American true-crime lore will immediately recognise the name of the town: it is the sleepy New England burg where Lizzie Borden lived and died, even after she was tried and acquitted of murdering her father and stepmother in 1892. Borden has of course been the subject of many previous features; she is sometimes portrayed in the traditional fashion as a crazed axe murderer, but also sometimes as a victim herself, perhaps of child abuse or the repressive mores of her time. (See, for instance, the queer take in Lizzie from 2018, which starred Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart.) The Inhabitant suggests Borden was inhabited, per the title, by an evil spirit that lives on in Fall River residents today; in fact in Tara and her family, a proposition supported by the fact that Emily’s sister Diane (Mary Buss) is locked up in a psychiatric facility for murdering her own baby.
It’s a slightly shopworn proposition as a genre move, but Lauder and screenwriter Kevin Bachar connect it effectively to more quotidian psychological motivations including sexual harassment (by the father of a family Tara) babysits, bullying at school, and general 21st-century teen angst, as illustrated by Tara’s best friend Suzy’s (Lizze Broadway, also excellent) habit of self-harming when stressed. There is so much brewing in the setup that it’s a shame that the final twists and reveals are a little boilerplate. Nevertheless, A’zion holds the fort all the way to the end and manages to sell the sillier devices with intensity, thoughtful costuming and dark circles the colour of old bruises under her eyes.
The Inhabitant is released on 14 August on digital platforms.
