Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Bo Mirhosseni
Starring: Paul Wesley, Jackie Cruz, Murphee Bloom, Rhonda Johnsson Dents
In a near future fascist America, a fugitive revolutionary hides out in
the one place nobody will want to look – a haunted house!
Writer/director Bo Mirhosseni's feature debut
History of Evil certainly has an arresting premise. But in
blending dystopian sci-fi with an old school horror trope, the film
plays like two separate narratives that keep getting in one another's
way.
Some opening text explains how it's 2045 and following a civil war,
America is now ruled by a fascist government, aided by groups of
bible-thumping, gun-wielding militia. A resistance has formed and one of
its key figures, freedom fighter Alegre Dyer (Jackie Cruz), has
just escaped from prison. Aided by a fellow revolutionary, Trudy (Rhonda Johnson Dents), Alegre is reunited with her husband Ron (Paul Wesley) and
their young daughter Daria (Murphee Bloom), who has no real
memory of her mother prior to her imprisonment.
The plan is to have an extraction team pick up Alegre and her family,
but until they arrive they must hide out in a remote abandoned home.
It's most definitely a fixer-upper, with no electricity and black sludge
pouring from the taps. "The reason nobody comes here is because they're
terrified of this place," Trudy tells Jackie, who oddly never asks why
people might be terrified of the house. It's enough of a warning for the
family's dog, who immediately runs off.
As Ron snoops around he begins to uncover the house's sordid past. In
the basement he finds a Klansman's hood and other creepy paraphernalia.
Taking its cues not so subtly from The Shining, the film has Ron discover the ghost of the house's previous tenant,
Cain (Thomas Francis Murphy), an old racist who murdered his wife
and child because they wouldn't come around to his bigoted ways. As Ron
spends time hanging out with the spectre he begins to take on board his
racist and misogynistic philosophy, becoming a threat to his
family.
I guess Mirhosseni is trying to say that if you scratch any white
person you'll find a racist underneath, but the film explores this idea
in the clunkiest of fashion. All it takes for Ron to transform from a
leftist revolutionary to a racist men's rights activist is to listen to
a few of Cain's bigoted anecdotes. Really? Despite the media being
flooded with the very same sentiments, it took a ghost to turn Ron
around?
Ron's instant about-face and his toxic new attitude is barely remarked
upon by Alegre, despite how broadly Wesley plays the role. It's
emblematic of a film in which creating realistic and relatable
characters seems a secondary concern as Mirhosseni is more interested in
his not so novel political message. The potential for an involving
subplot concerning Alegre's attempts to reconnect with her daughter are
left unexplored. We never learn much about Alegre, or even about her
political beliefs, and when she delivers a cringey speech about fighting
fascism late on it has all the resonance of a Facebook post written by a
soccer mom who just learned that Donald Trump guy isn't a very nice
man.
None of the horror stuff works here because it's so hackneyed and
unconvincing. More successful is the dystopian sci-fi background, with
some nice ideas like how the militia forces people to swear on a tablet
pdf of the Bible. The movie's only tense sequences involve Ron trying to
deceive the militia at a road checkpoint and when they pay a
heavily-armed visit to the not so safe house. But it only serves to make
us wish we could get away from the house and its sub-Shining
antics and see what's happening elsewhere in this dystopian world. Men
with guns and God on their side are far more terrifying than ghosts,
because we have proof of their existence in the real world.
History of Evil is on Shudder
from February 23rd.
