Yet the most frustrating thing about “There is someone inside your house” has to be the gulf between the stated qualities of its characters and their actual behavior. Chipper and cruel student council leader Katie (Sarah Dugdale) are hunted down and sent into an early murder scene set in a church, which suggests that the filmmakers are more interested in twists and turns than character development. And honestly, Katie isn’t much more of a character than, say, Makani, whose main draw comes from her barely considered past.
Makani spends much of the film walking on eggshells, trying to distance himself from revealing trauma, but also keeping his relationship with Ollie somewhat a secret (although they kiss several times in his car). Park is certainly charismatic enough to carry her scenes, and for a while it’s easy to follow Makani as she struggles to keep a low profile. But there’s not much to Makani beyond Park’s suggestive performance, let alone Makani’s threadbare and mostly implicit relationship with his sleepwalking grandmother (BJ Harrison), or his cute, but mundane thing. with Ollie.
Like Katie, Makani takes the plot a step further and lends a little more weight to a storyline that keeps telling you what it is: a diverse community of alienated teens, defined as they are by their ability to choose when and what they can share about themselves. Too bad that all the haves are mustache caricatures and that all the have-nots are indistinct reserved spaces.
This may be a product of the nature of the film as an adaptation, but there’s never really a moment in “There’s Someone Inside Your House” that suggests its protagonists are real enough to be worth researching. They talk a lot about hiding from each other, but often don’t seem human enough to be believable.
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