I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016) is a slow-burn ghost story from Osgood Perkins, ready to watch online on iFILM. A live-in nurse named Lily moves into the country home of a dying author and soon senses she isn't the only one there.

Her patient, horror novelist Iris Blum, rarely leaves her bed and keeps calling Lily by another name: Polly. Played by Ruth Wilson, Lily passes the empty hours with one of Iris's old books, about a young woman who vanished inside these very rooms decades ago. The wall between fiction and the house grows thin. Lily's hushed narration tells us from the first minute that she is twenty-eight and will never be older, so the dread comes not from guessing who, but from watching how. Paula Prentiss plays the author, with Bob Balaban in a small part.

This is mood over jump scares, closer to a Shirley Jackson tale than to modern multiplex horror. It rewards patience and a taste for quiet rooms that won't stay quiet. Stream I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016) online on iFILM.