His House

Bol and Rial Majur flee South Sudan in a dangerously overcrowded boat crossing the Mediterranean. During the crossing, a young girl — Nyagak — goes into the water and does not come back up. They arrive in England, are detained, and eventually granted provisional asylum: a run-down council house in Peckham, a small weekly stipend, and strict conditions. They are not to work. They are not to cause trouble. They are to wait.

Bol throws himself into assimilation with a desperate, almost frantic energy — he wants to dress English, eat English, think English. Rial is quieter and more uncertain, not yet sure what she wants from this new life or whether it wants her. The house is cold, falling apart, and poorly lit. Strange things begin almost immediately: sounds from within the walls, shadows at the edge of vision, a figure that looks like Nyagak standing at the end of the hall. Bol tears into the plaster trying to find the source. He finds a dark cavity. Something is in there.

The haunting deepens. It becomes clear that what followed them is an apeth — a night witch from Dinka folklore, a spirit that feeds on the living and cannot simply be moved away from. Bol begins feeding his own flesh into the holes in the walls, trying to bargain, trying to satisfy it. He hides all of this — from Rial, from their caseworker, from the neighbors — terrified that any sign of instability will cost them the only foothold they have.

Rial seeks connection outside the house and finds a community of South Sudanese people living nearby. Through them and through the film's accumulating flashbacks, the full truth assembles itself: Nyagak was not their daughter. During the chaos of fleeing — their village burning, bodies in the road — Bol took Nyagak from her real family. He told himself it was survival. She died on the water anyway. The apeth has followed them not only out of grief but because of that specific transgression: a life was stolen, and then lost, and it has come to collect.

Bol and Rial are forced to face the truth together — about Nyagak, about what Bol did, about the impossible arithmetic of survival. The apeth's demand is clear: someone must answer for it. The film's resolution comes not through fighting or fleeing but through acknowledgment — they must stop trying to outrun what they did and sit with it instead. They survive. The house remains. What they carry does not leave, but they are still standing at the end, together, in the wreckage of the life they built on top of a lie.