His House

• Remi Weekes wrote and directed it as his feature debut, working from a story by Felicity Evans and Toby Venables. It premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival on January 27, was acquired by Netflix, and dropped October 30, 2020.
• The apeth was physically performed by Javier Botet — the Spanish creature specialist with Marfan syndrome known for Mama, REC and It — with Cornell S. John supplying the voice.
• Production used three real spaces: the house exterior was shot on location at 113 Adelaide Road in Tilbury, Essex; the interior was rebuilt as a full set at West London Film Studios (where the house visibly strips itself down across the film); and Morocco stood in for the South Sudan scenes.
• The sea-crossing flashback was shot practically in a studio water tank at Pinewood rather than with digital water — Weekes even had the kitchen wall hauled into the tank and lit to match the earlier scene so the camera could pull back from the kitchen straight into the open ocean.
• It cleaned up at the 2020 British Independent Film Awards with four wins — Best Director for Weekes, Best Actress for Wunmi Mosaku, plus Best Effects and Best Production Design — and Weekes took the 2021 BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer.
• The apeth is grounded in real Dinka belief from South Sudan — a 'night witch' documented in anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt's research — said to consume its victim psychologically and physically until a debt for something stolen is repaid, which is the whole engine of the haunting.

The house is not haunted by ghosts so much as by bookkeeping. The apeth is a debt collector, and the debt is Nyagak — the girl Bol grabbed to buy three seats on the truck, then drowned. Every spectral child in the walls is interest accruing on a life he stole to secure his own.

Bol and Rial split the film's two survival strategies and the haunting punishes both. Bol tears out the walls and burns the past to assimilate; Rial keeps her scars and her language and refuses to forget. The apeth only releases them once they stop fighting over which lie to live — 'we are with our ghosts' is the closest thing to peace the film offers, survival earned by carrying the dead rather than denying them.

The peeling, too-big house is itself the monster's mouth. The British asylum system tells them to be grateful for a rotting box on a sink estate, and the apeth literally lives inside that 'generosity.' The real-world horror — conditional welcome, surveillance, the order to behave — is what gives the supernatural debt somewhere to nest.

Bol and Rial survive the crossing from war-torn South Sudan and land in a peeling government rowhouse on the edge of London, granted asylum on the condition they behave like grateful guests. The walls won't let them. Something scratches behind the plaster, the dead they left in the water start surfacing in the dark, and a night witch called an apeth comes to collect a debt that has nothing to do with rent. The horror isn't the house. It's what they did to get into the truck.