Bishal Dutta’s It Lives Inside is the kind of debut that tiptoes into the room with a jar and then smashes it on your expectations. It’s a supernatural chiller that feasts on two cuisines at once—immigrant-family drama and teen horror—then wipes its mouth on your letterman jacket. The result is lean, moody, and deliciously specific, with enough bite marks of cultural detail to make the scares feel personal. Also, it’s a rare film where the monster is terrifying, the metaphors are tidy, and the protagonist’s mother is not only alive but also correct. Terrifying!
Our heroine is Samidha “Sam” (a fierce, flinty Megan Suri), an Indian-American teen who’s calibrating her social survival like it’s an AP exam: reduce spice, lighten lunchbox, pronounce your own name as if you’re apologizing. Dutta stages Sam’s identity juggling with bemused precision—every locker door a curtain to a smaller stage, every classroom a tribunal. Her former best friend Tamira (Mohana Krishnan, exquisitely haunted) drifts the halls hugging a mysterious glass jar like it’s an emotional support thermos, muttering about an evil presence inside. Sam, mortified on behalf of her future prom photos, does what many teenagers would do in a horror movie and zero actual teenagers would do in life: she breaks the jar. That wet slap you hear is not just plot; it’s the sound of generational karma high-fiving itself.
Enter the Pishach, a folkloric demon that runs on shame, grief, and late-night fridge meat. Dutta resists the modern urge to turn folklore into a downloadable content pack; he chooses suggestion over taxonomy. The creature isn’t overexplained; it’s over-there—in corners, vents, school stairwells, as if toxic assimilation itself learned parkour. When it finally shows itself, it looks like something that crawled out of a story your aunt warned you not to read after sundown. Practical textures, sparing CG, shadows that behave like rumors—it’s a throwback in the best way.
As a horror delivery system, It Lives Inside is admirably old-school: patient setups, clever sound design, a score that knows when to purr and when to pounce. The film finds scares in small domestic gestures—an ofrenda of spices, a thali’s metallic clink, a doorway you suddenly realize is a mouth. The house isn’t grand or gothic; it’s right, which is so much worse. And Dutta shoots the high school with the same dread he applies to the haunted house, which is both accurate and rude.
The film’s secret weapon is its mother-daughter duel. Poorna (Neeru Bajwa, delivering with the surgical calm of a mom who’s already triaged three worse crises before breakfast) is the archetypal “don’t forget who you are” parent, rendered with nuance rather than nagging. She’s protective without being saintly, spiritual without sermonizing. In a standout sequence, she and Sam prep sweet offerings while steeling themselves for a not-so-sweet visitor, and it plays like a two-woman heist: saffron, sugar, and steely resolve. If the movie has a mission statement, it’s in Poorna’s steady gaze: love is a boundary, not a leash.
Megan Suri anchors everything. Sam’s arc—from mortified assimilationist to reluctant custodian of cultural horror—feels earned. She’s funny in that dry teen way (“yes, I’m haunted, but also, like, bio homework”), prickly when cornered, and convincingly terrified without becoming a shrieking siren. Watch the micro-flinches when someone mispronounces her name, the eyeroll armor cracking in front of Russ (Gage Marsh, pleasant human golden retriever), the instant calculus when a teacher (Betty Gabriel, warmly pragmatic) shifts from concern to concern-ed. Suri does the heavy lifting of an identity horror story: she makes the metaphors move.
Speaking of metaphors, the film sidesteps the clunkiest pitfalls of “culture as monster.” The Pishach isn’t a stand-in for tradition; it’s a parasite that exploits alienation. If anything, tradition is the toolkit—prayers as passwords, rituals as protocol. The climactic turn, in which Sam chooses to contain the demon rather than obliterate it, is the rare horror ending that’s both clever and thematically honest. You don’t beat shame or grief; you manage it, feed it safely, keep it from eating everything else. It’s an ending that’s quietly radical for a teen horror: not a victory lap, but a maintenance plan. The film’s dark joke is that adulthood is just long-term case management—for your monster and everyone else’s.
Technically, this thing hums. Matthew Lynn’s cinematography favors patient frames that let darkness pool like ink; hallways recede into suggestion, while the abandoned house set piece turns drywall into parchment scrawled with threat. Wesley Hughes’s score threads in percussive thumps and eerie choral sighs without ever going full “ancient exotic” pastiche; it supports instead of shouting, which is more than I can say for some demons. The sound design earns multiple jump-credits: a jar hairline crack, an exhale that isn’t yours, cutlery that suddenly feels like sigils. When the Pishach is near, the room seems to suck a breath and hold it.
Is the high-school plotting boilerplate at times? Sure. Russ exists mostly to be nice, kissable, and edible—by a demon or by fate, I won’t say. A couple of scare setups are telegraphed by the classic “camera lingers on empty space” language. But even the familiar beats arrive with a cultural specificity that makes them feel fresher. When Sam dodges a heritage celebration to hang with friends, the horror isn’t “tradition bad” or “West bad”; it’s the terrible wedge of wanting two worlds to clap for you at the same time. Spoiler: they rarely sync.
Dark humor shimmers at the edges. A school assembly becomes a slow-motion buffet for a spirit who loves negative energy (so, all assemblies). The most realistic detail in the whole movie? A teacher Googling ancient demonology on a public school computer like the IT department won’t notice. And somewhere a guidance counselor is drafting an email: “Hi Sam! Quick check-in: on a scale from 1–10, how haunted do you feel today?”
What lingers isn’t just the creature—it’s the film’s compassion. Dutta lets Tamira’s trauma be messy without turning her into a spectacle, and gives Sam’s parents interiority beyond “strict vs. chill.” Even Inesh (Vik Sahay), the gentler parent, gets a moment of real jeopardy that reframes him as more than the comic relief of permissiveness. The film’s final dinner—a quasi-Seder of meat for the monster—is both macabre and tender: a family choosing to hold what would otherwise break them. If that isn’t immigrant-household poetry, I don’t know what is.
By the time credits roll, It Lives Inside has accomplished something sneaky: it’s told a scary story about a teenage girl, respected her intelligence, refused to punish her for survival tactics, and found a way to say, “You’re allowed to carry your parents’ ghosts without being crushed by them.” Also, the monster looks cool. Multitudes!
Verdict: A sharp, spooky, culturally grounded horror that understands the scariest thing in high school isn’t the demon—it’s being seen. Come for the Pishach, stay for Megan Suri’s star-making turn, and call your mother afterwards. She was right about the jar. She is always right about the jar.
