The Allen House in Monticello, Arkansas. Image courtesy of the IMDb.
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The Perfect Host: A Southern Gothic Tale (2018), directed by Derrick Sims; starring Sulima Rodriguez, Janis Duley, and Chase Ryan Jeffery. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: when it comes to horror, in order to have the dark, you must have the light. Even a film as dark and disturbing as Kubrick’s The Shining has some light: Hallorann’s prune jokes and girlie pics; Wendy and Danny playing in the maze; the guy reading the Playboy magazine in the lobby of the Overlook on closing day.
Without the light, there’s nothing for the dark side to play off of, and things just get tedious very quickly. This film, the director’s debut, is above all, unrelentingly tedious. It’s dark and somber from beginning to end, with not a single speck of light to relieve the gloomy tedium. It’s also not in the least bit scary or creepy, and it’s paced far too slow for most viewers’ taste. The plot is paper thin, and the dialogue is often delivered in a solemn monotone and punctuated with long, irritating silences—a typical failing of first-time indie films, where the director and writer think their film is more significant that it actually is.
All of this is kinda sad, because this film’s got a fantastic setting: the Allen House in Monticello, Arkansas, an enormous private mansion that’s reputed to be haunted in real life. The unusual architecture of the house combines classic Greek Revival columns with fanciful, domed Queen Anne towers and other Victorian fripperies. Frankly, I would have liked to have seen more of the house, and less of the dreary characters.
The plot follows a world-weary single mother named Julie (Rodriguez) and her little daughter Ellie, as they journey to a small town in the rural South to settle the effects of Julie’s recently deceased grandmother. Sadly, Rodriguez is simply miscast, for several reasons. First, she’s weak in the role, pushing the world-weary, emotionally numb character way too far, although this may be the fault of the director, not the actress.
Second, she is very Hispanic-looking and seems out of place in the setting. Early on, for example, she has a fight with a cousin and is thrown out of her dead “MeeMaw’s” house; however, she looks more like someone who would have had an Abuela, not a MeeMaw.
It’s confusing for the viewer, who has to indulge in some mental gymnastics to make sense of her presence; “okay, maybe her father was a Latino from California or New York, and he blew into a small Arkansas town one day and ended up marrying a white redneck woman, that would work...” Adding a back story such as this would have been a big improvement to the plot.
After being thrown out of MeeMaw’s house by the cousin (we are never told why), Julie and her daughter receive an offer from an elderly acquaintance named Mrs. Allen (Duley) to stay in the vast Allen mansion until her visit is over. Mrs. Allen was dear friends with Alma, the deceased MeeMaw, and she’s very kindly disposed to Julie and her daughter for that reason.
Once in the house, Mrs. Allen begins acting a little goofy, but not really menacing. Duley is quite simply a terrible actress; if you want to see a kickass portrayal of a crazy old Southern lady, watch the late Gena Rowlands in The Skeleton Key (2005).
A sub-plot involving a former redneck boyfriend who may or may not be the little girl’s father (Jeffery) goes nowhere. However, Jeffery is the strongest talent in the film, so it’s kind of a relief whenever his character pops up. He is also the only character who actually acts like a Southerner; one of the many failings of this film is that, despite being billed as a “Southern Gothic,” it’s not very Southern. The limp plot and characters could be from anywhere. Which is odd, because director Sims is a native Arkansan.
This is a film that could be used as a textbook example of what not to do when crafting a Gothic haunted house story. There’s a lot of forced build-up to a very unsatisfactory, confusing conclusion. For example, a priest arrives at one point to perform some cleansing ritual in the house, but we never see what he's trying to cleanse.
At the end, we learn that apparently, Mrs. Allen's deceased young daughter is haunting the house, but the old lady is the one who kept her body around, so why is she calling in the priest to get rid of the spirit? Why is she giving Julie and Ellie a crucifix to ward away evil spirits? It's also suggested that Mrs. Allen wanted to transfer her daughter's spirit to the body of little Ellie, but again, this is not really made plain to the viewer. Currently streaming on Amazon. A disappointing 3/10.
