Release Date: October 30, 2020 (Netflix)
Runtime: 93 minutes (1 hr 33 min)
Rated: Not Rated
Production Companies: Regency Enterprises, BBC Films, Vertigo Entertainment, Starchild Pictures
Producers: Aidan Elliott, Martin Gentles, Arnon Milchan, Ed King, Roy Lee
Cinematography: Jo Willems
Editing: Julia Bloch
Music/Composer: Roque Baños
His House (2020)
Director: Remi Weekes
Writer: Remi Weekes (screenplay), story by Felicity Evans & Toby Venables
Cast: Sope Dirisu, Wunmi Mosaku, Matt Smith, Javier Botet, Emily Taaffe, Malaika Abigaba
Hot on the heels of her recent BAFTA win for her work in Sinners, it only felt right to spotlight Wunmi Mosaku in this Black History Month highlight. Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, who stars opposite her in this folklore horror feature, is no stranger to powerful Black cinema either. And Akinola Davies Jr., who recently won the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer, directed Dìrísù in his award-winning piece My Father’s Shadow — a film I previously wrote about which you can read here.
So when I revisited His House, directed by Remi Weekes, it struck differently. Having now witnessed both Mosaku and Dìrísù in some of my most beloved recent releases, their pairing here feels even more resonant.
If their performances aren’t enough of a selling point, the film’s stunning cinematography, its emotionally layered storytelling, and its heart-wrenching historical lens surely will be — not just for entertainment, but for urgently humane reasons rooted in truth and lived history.
Black History Month is often framed through familiar American narratives, but the Black diaspora stretches far beyond those borders. His House offers an opportunity to acknowledge South Sudan’s history — one shaped by colonial interference, civil war, and displacement — and to recognize how those stories remain deeply relevant today.
Colonial Roots
Set between modern-day South Sudan and Britain, His House carries historical weight that deepens every frame. South Sudan’s instability traces back to colonial rule. In the late nineteenth century, the region was governed as part of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan under British administration. The British governed the north and south separately, fostering political, cultural, and economic divisions that would later erupt into violence.
The north was largely Arab and Muslim. The south was largely Christian and animist, composed of numerous ethnic groups including the Dinka and Nuer. When Sudan gained independence in 1956, power consolidated in the north, marginalizing the south politically and economically. What followed were decades of devastating conflict that shaped generations.
Civil Wars
Two major wars erupted between the Sudanese government in the north and southern rebel groups: the First Civil War (1955–1972) and the Second Civil War (1983–2005). The Second Civil War proved especially catastrophic, resulting in approximately two million deaths, millions displaced, widespread famine, destroyed villages, and intensified ethnic divisions.
The war ended in 2005 with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, granting the south autonomy and the right to vote for independence — a fragile hope that would soon reveal its own complications.
Independence & Collapse
2011: South Sudan becomes independent — the world’s newest nation.
2013: President Salva Kiir (Dinka) and Vice President Riek Machar (Nuer) clash politically. That dispute spirals into civil war.
What began as a political rift fractures along ethnic lines. The violence includes:
• Mass killings
• Ethnic targeting
• Sexual violence used as a weapon of war
• Child soldier recruitment
• Famine conditions
By 2018, hundreds of thousands were dead, over four million displaced, and South Sudan faced one of the largest refugee crises in Africa.
This is the landscape Bol and Rial are running from.
Weekes does not allow us the comfort of distance from that reality. We witness Bol (Dìrísù) and Rial (Mosaku) in the chaos of their final moments in South Sudan — gunfire erupting, people scrambling, desperation overtaking reason. Their escape culminates in a treacherous boat journey to Europe, where the storm becomes both literal and symbolic. It is during this crossing that Nyagak (Malaika Wakoli-Abigaba), the young girl traveling with them and presented to us as their daughter, drowns alongside many others. Her death becomes the emotional and narrative anchor of the film.
Months later, we find them in a British detention center, isolated and suspended in bureaucratic limbo. The nightmares persist — flashes of the boat, the water, the faces of those lost. The horror here is procedural before it becomes supernatural: waiting, scrutiny, conditional approval. Their tribunal experience feels clinical, almost patronizing, reducing unimaginable trauma into paperwork and policy.
Upon release, they are given strict conditions: they cannot work, they must remain in their assigned home, and any violation could result in deportation. Their caseworker, Mark (Matt Smith), appears supportive at first, even hopeful. Yet when he expresses his desire for them to be among “the good ones,” the language reveals the quiet othering beneath the surface. Acceptance, we learn, is conditional. Humanity is negotiable.
Before a single ghost appears, Weekes grounds the film in the horror of displacement. Bol immediately attempts assimilation. He changes their clothes, insists on eating with utensils, mimics British mannerisms, and ventures out into the neighborhood seeking belonging. His urgency to fit in feels less like eagerness and more like survival strategy. Rial, by contrast, resists. She keeps Nyagak’s necklace. She eats with her hands. She clings to memory as preservation rather than burden.
In a quietly devastating scene, Rial becomes lost in a maze of identical houses while searching for a doctor using a map. When she encounters young Black British men who mock and other her, the horror transcends genre. Even among those who share her skin tone, she is marked as foreign. Displacement compounds itself. The fear here is not a jump scare — it is erasure.
Then the sounds begin. Scratching in the walls. Figures emerging from darkness. Bol reacts with aggression, burning their old belongings in an attempt to sever ties with the past. Yet the past is not so easily incinerated. The apparitions confront him violently, particularly during his catatonic episodes. He relives the boat crossing. The drowning. The panic. Rial’s encounters are quieter, more intimate, almost mournful — as though the spirits approach her with sorrow rather than fury.
She identifies the presence as an apeth, a night witch from South Sudanese folklore that follows those with unresolved debts. And they have a debt.
The film’s most devastating reveal arrives through a seamless transition back to the moment of escape. As families scramble to board an overcrowded bus amid erupting violence, Bol grabs a young girl from the crowd. Only families with children are permitted passage. Nyagak was never their daughter. She was taken in desperation. As the bus drives away, we see her mother left behind in a storm of gunfire — seconds from safety.
The drowning was tragedy. The kidnapping was choice.
That distinction reshapes everything. What initially felt like a story of pure victimhood becomes layered with unbearable moral complexity. The haunting is no longer simply grief — it is accountability.
Back in Britain, paranoia escalates. Rial briefly contemplates sacrificing Bol to end the torment. Instead, Bol chooses to sacrifice himself, stabbing himself in an attempt to repay the apeth and restore balance. The horror crescendos into something more archetypal as a towering creature attempts to burrow beneath his skin. Yet Rial recognizes the deception. She kills the apeth, rejecting the idea that redemption requires further violence.
When Mark returns for inspection, the house is repaired. The hole in the floor left by the creature is humorously covered with a rug — a quiet acknowledgment that not everything can be neatly erased. The ghosts remain. But Bol now acknowledges “the life he stole.” Rather than suppress the memory, they choose to live alongside it.
The house becomes a metaphor not just for Britain, but for survival itself — cracked, imperfect, haunted, yet still standing.
Weekes transforms folklore horror into a layered meditation on displacement, colonial aftermath, ethnic conflict, survivor’s guilt, and the brutal calculus of survival. The film refuses to sanitize the refugee experience. Bol and Rial are not portrayed as flawless victims, but as human beings forced into impossible choices by systems far larger than themselves.
And the horror does not end with the film’s credits.
Today, South Sudan remains politically fragile. Elections have been repeatedly delayed, localized violence continues, and economic instability and climate disasters — particularly severe flooding — have displaced hundreds of thousands more. Millions of South Sudanese remain refugees abroad, and the majority of the population relies on humanitarian assistance. The war that Bol and Rial fled may have formally subsided, but the instability that shaped their trauma persists in quieter, grinding ways. The ghosts in His House are not relics of a distant past; they echo a nation still struggling to stabilize.
It is a story about being othered in the very moment you need compassion most. About the cost of assimilation. About the weight of guilt that follows survival. And about the uncomfortable truth that sometimes, in order to live, people are forced to make choices that will haunt them forever.
Black History Month should not only celebrate triumph — it should make space for reckoning. For nations still rebuilding. For refugees still waiting. For stories that complicate the idea of survival. His House reminds us that Black history is not monolithic, not confined to one continent or country, and not always resolved. Sometimes it lingers. Sometimes it haunts. And sometimes, it demands that we sit with it.