My first non-midnight screening of this
year's TIFF was Osgood Perkins' newest I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives in the House aka The Movie With the Ridiculously Long Title.
A hospice nurse (Ruth Wilson) takes a
job caring for an elderly author (Paula Prentiss) only to find the
house is haunted.
As evidenced in his previous film
February – now known as The Blackcoat's Daughter – Osgood
Perkins' sensibilities lie with an older era of cinema. He exists in a place where films took their time, lingered on shadows and cricked
their ears at the sounds in the walls. That is why I feel very few
people will have the patience for this effort. Programmer Colin
Geddes used the word “literary” to describe it and I think that was apt, as history and the written word played a large part in the
story.
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Ruth Wilson as Lily in I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. |
Regrettably, much like what I said of
Blair Witch, the genre has moved on, for better or worse, from this
kind of filmmaking. The pace and payoff were not in-your-face and
Perkins' interpretation of the ghost was more A&E than MTV. That
said, I'm grateful that at least Perkins has a voice. Pretty Thing is
not insipid emulation. We have titles like last year's Darling if
that's your bag. Actually, these two titles share very little, I just
wanted to reiterate how much of a garbage pile that movie was.
As for me, I think February had more to
offer. I do have to say thank God for Ruth Wilson though, as her
awkward and skittish, yet endearing character, was easy for me to get
behind when she used phrases like “silly billy” and “heavens to
Betsy.” Since there really wasn't much else going on here, I was
glad to have something to latch onto. Although, I was admittedly
intrigued by the philosophy of the piece that you cannot own a house
that suffered a death in it, only borrow it.
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Director Osgood Perkins |
Overall, I think I appreciated Pretty
Thing more than I liked it. It's probably not a film I would ever
revisit, but I still think it was a competently told haunted house
tale.
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