Crew
Director – Jerren Lauder, Screenplay – Kevin Bachar, Producers – Petr Jakl, Leone Marucci & Terence O’Keefe, Photography – Brian Sowell, Music – Sanford Parker, Visual Effects – Artisus (Supervisor – Toby Martisius), Special Effects – Tate Steinsiek, Production Design – Meg Cabell. Production Company – Steelyard Pictures/R.U. Robot Studios.
Cast
Odessa A’zion (Tara Holden), Leslie Bibb (Emily Holden), Dermot Mulroney (Ben Holden), Lizzie Broadway (Suzie), Michael Cooper Jr. (Carl), Mary Buss (Aunt Diane), Kenneisha Thompson (Detective Childs), Ryan Francis (Detective Gaines), Todd Jenkins (Mikhail Loeb), Lois Leftwich (Gail Loeb), Jackson Dean Vincent (Caleb Holden), Sabreen Iman (Dr. Sanchez)
Plot
Fall River, Massachusetts, the present day. Teenager Tara Holden sees a vision of Lizzie Borden in her room and begins to have troubling thoughts about wanting to kill her family. Not long after, people around the town who have annoyed Tara are attacked.
Director Jerren Lauder first came to my attention a couple of years ago with the attention grabbingly titled Stay Out of the Fucking Attic (2020) about house movers finding a house of Nazi experiments. The Inhabitant was Lauder’s second film and he subsequently went on to co-direct You’re Killing Me (2023).
The true-life story of Lizzie Borden (1860-1927) has an infamy in true crime fiction. In Fall River, Massachusetts in 1892, Lizzie killed her father and her stepmother with an axe but was acquitted in the subsequent court case. There have been various tellings of her story with The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975) starring Elizabeth Montgomery, Lizzie Borden Took an Ax (2014) starring Christina Ricci and the excellent Lizzie (2018) with Chloe Sevigny. The Inhabitant falls more into the spate of films where Lizzie Borden becomes a ghost or revenant with the likes of The Curse of Lizzie Borden (2006), Lizzie (2012), Lizzie Borden’s Revenge (2013) and American Poltergeist (2015).
Given its’ attaching itself to a legendary if not folklore figure like Lizzie Borden, The Inhabitant should have been more interesting than it is. It is mannered and calm and nothing much happens throughout. You wait for it to develop some teeth – to show murders of the victims around town, let us see someone possessed – but we get nothing except a couple of forgettable attacks. The rest of the film is about Odessa A’zion having some visions and everybody discussing whether she is having behavioural issues or not. There is a predictable twist in the tale that overturns what we thought was going on. All of which proves quite a letdown.
I have yet to be sold on Odessa A’zion as a lead actress – she played in the remake of Hellraiser (2022) the same year as this and has subsequently gone onto other more high-profile works. She seems to have a look that you would take her to be a perpetually stoned – she doesn’t quite slot into either the Girl Next Door or the alt.girl look. She’s serviceable and with a little more effort you could see her slotting into the types of roles that Natasha Lyonne plays, but as here it feels she is drifting through roles that do no more than pad a cv.
Trailer here