In It Lives Inside, writer-director Bishal Dutta’s debut feature film, the horrors of cultural assimilation manifest as very real demons in a terrifyingly clever commentary on the Indian-American experience. For Megan Suri, the movie’s lead, the real cultural touchstones that inspire this horror are close to home.
Suri sat down for an exclusive chat with SheKnows’ Reshma Gopaldas to reflect on her how her own identity informed her role in this already highly-praised film. Suri was permitted to conduct this interview amid the actors’ strike through an interim agreement between SAG-AFTRA and Neon, the movie’s distributor.
Suri told SheKnows that her first conversations with Dutta were “cosmic.” The 24-year-old star, who was born in the US to Punjabi parents, added, “I was so ecstatic that it was a brown lead. It was centered around brown people.”
In It Lives Inside, Suri plays Samidha, an Indian-American teenager who is increasingly distancing herself from anything to do with her cultural identity. She avoids speaking Hindi and falls out with her Indian-American classmate and former best friend Tamira (Mohana Krishnan). In doing so, she unknowingly unleashes a demon taken from Hindu mythology.
The movie allegorizes the inner turmoil experienced by children of immigrants who are fighting for acceptance in a land outside of their ancestral home and, in doing so, creates a space for this experience in the horror genre.
For Suri, her character’s story is close to home. “It was one of the reasons why I was so gravitated towards playing Sam,” she says. In the movie, Suri’s character is teased by her classmates and struggles to fit in, leaving her insecure about everything from her language to her packed lunches. “I understood from, you know, a personal level what those nuances are like and what those feelings are like.”
The Never Have I Ever star notes the movie, which she calls “the first of its kind,” is also tackling some tropes that have been attached to Indian-American characters in film and TV over the years. One such trope, Suri points out, is the archetypal stern Indian father. It Lives Inside takes a different approach by portraying Sam’s heartwarming relationship with her doting father Inesh (Vik Sahay).
“It was really beautiful to see a warm, friendly, playful Indian daughter and father relationship. That’s one that I have with my own dad,” Suri says. “I’m so glad that we did because we never really see that.”
Outside of tackling hefty themes of internalized racism and the complicated nature of the immigrant experience, the movie also gave rise to some refreshingly wholesome moments on set. One such moment occured between Suri and Neeru Bajwa, who plays Sam’s mother Poorna.
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“I was feeling a little homesick and I was missing my mom’s parathas and, lo and behold, without missing a beat [or] without even asking Neeru brought me, in tinfoil, in proper Indian fashion, parathas on set,” Suri recalls. “It was such a beautiful way of [saying] ‘we understand each other, this feels familial, we understand the culture.’ This is what we would do in our culture and it was so heartwarming.”
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