An Indian teen girl struggles to fit in at an American high school, rejecting her culture and family. When a demonic spirit latches onto her former best friend, she must embrace her heritage to defeat it. A film by Bishal Dutta, starring Megan Suri, Mohana Krishnan, Betty Gabriel, Gage Marsh, and Vik Sahay.

Sam (Megan Suri), an Indian-American teenager assimilating into Western society, speaks only English, even when her mother, Poorna (Neeru Bajwa), a traditional Indian housewife, speaks to her in Hindi at home. Poorna asks Sam to participate in a family tradition, and Sam reluctantly agrees.

At school, Joyce (Betty Gabriel), a concerned teacher, notices one of her students, Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), an Indian teenager, acting withdrawn and carrying a strange glass jar. Joyce approaches Sam, knowing that they used to be close friends, and asks if she knows anything about Tamira’s behavior. Sam, however, is reluctant to associate with Tamira and tells Joyce that she is a grownup now and can ask for help herself if she needs it.

In the basement, Tamira feeds a piece of raw meat to something inside the jar she has been carrying everywhere. The jar shakes violently, as if something inside is trying to escape.

The next day, in the school locker room, Tamira approaches Sam and begs for her help, claiming that a supernatural entity is trapped in the jar. Sam, frustrated and embarrassed by Tamira and her jar, slaps it out of Tamira’s hands, shattering it on the floor. Tamira, shocked and terrified, walks away.

Sam chases after Tamira and catches her at the school entrance to return the notebook that she dropped in the locker room. The doors behind Sam open on their own, as if something has just passed through them. Tamira screams in terror, making Sam panic, but she sees nothing out of the ordinary.

Sam quickly rushes inside to seek help, ignoring Tamira’s pleas not to be left alone. When she returns with Joyce, Tamira has already vanished, unaware that she has been taken by the supernatural entity.

The most impressive scene is arguably the opening, in which the camera glides through rooms revealing bloody claw marks on the walls and corpses on the floor. It descends to the basement, where viewers glimpse a charred body with smoke rising from it, and a glass jar lying on the ground. The scene sends shivers down the spine, foreshadowing the horrors to come.

The first half of the film engages viewers with an innovative and original plot, but the second half falls flat, with irrelevant subplots and ambiguous flashbacks that fail to heighten the atmosphere. The supernatural entity is revealed to be simply another monster that can appear and disappear at will. The film never explains why or how it latched onto its first victim, or why the victim possesses a notebook containing the spell to capture it. The more closely we examine the film, the more illogical it becomes.

IT LIVES INSIDE premiered at SXSW film festival on 11 March 2023. The film was theatrically released in the United States on 22 September, by NEON.