Her House
2024 · 12m · United States
Directed by Will Lee
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A young woman and her estranged mother are forced to reconcile when an evil presence is found inside the home of their recently deceased matriarch.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Grief-haunted-by-literal-haunting feels like the kind of premise everyone's already made, but Lee resists the obvious—the evil presence isn't the point, the estrangement is, and that refusal to let the horror eclipse the human mess is genuinely strange.
A competent execution of the grief-horror hybrid that's become increasingly visible in post-2020 festival programming, though it lacks the formal risk or revisionist stance that would distinguish it from its lineage—solid craft in service of familiar thematic architecture.
The decision to keep the mother-daughter friction front-and-center rather than subordinate it to jump scares is what saves this; a 12-minute runtime where every scene has to justify itself, and Lee's willingness to let silence and resentment do more work than the supernatural mechanics is the move that makes it land.