A couple from South Sudan flee the desert and end up in the United Kingdom after a hellish journey. There Bol (Soap Dirisu) and Riyal (Vunami Mosaku) are assigned a house after spending a period in a detention center. You can say that they are moving from jail to jail. Because although they were allowed to enter the free world as asylum seekers, they are urged by asylum staff to follow strict rules: no visitors, integrate neatly and don’t do strange things. And their new home – a tarnished single-family home in a wintry neighborhood – also captivates.
The film begins with a grueling journey of Bol and Riyal. It is later revealed that he lost his daughter on the way to Europe. Once they settled in their house, their beloved daughter also left with many other drowning people. While Ryall enters a conversation with the ghosts, Bol tries to fight the creatures by attacking them with a hammer behind walls and in crawl places in a state of madness. To the dismay of his philanthropists, who sadly see that the house is beginning to look more hopeless.
Gradually Bol decides he wants to stay in England permanently, while Rial, whispered by the ghost-headed witch, wants to return. Bol tries to assimilate to make contact with the local population; The riyal begins wearing traditional attire and increasingly speaks of Dinaka (the language spoken in South Sudan and the surrounding area). In his Sundance acclaimed feature debut, filmmaker Remy Weeks intelligently portrays the difference between West and Africa and how it is inextricably linked to colonial history. Witness the manner in which Riyal and Bol are treated after arriving in England.
We have already seen, for example in Atlantic (2019), how well the genre lends a film to highlight themes of such trauma and loss. And this time a British horror film set not in a sinister villa, but in a social rental house. Who would have thought that it could be haunted in a terraced house? With Weeks His House shows that there are still countless gruesome and timely stories that deserve a place.
