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Overview
Welcome to your new house. No, not that one. The mirror image one. Don’t worry, it will all be fine.
And why worry? Your dead husband was cheating on you, wasn’t he?
Maybe you’re just going crazy. Or maybe you really are being followed by a non-entity.
Maybe you should have just stayed dead.
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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9731534/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_House
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Transcript
Stephen: [00:00:00] we’ve got a night house. I guess we’ll just get rolling. All right. Okay. Welcome. I’m I should have looked this up whatever episode number we’re on. 11, 10, 11.
Rhys: I could actually count backwards and tell you. We can count
Stephen: backwards. That’s impressive.
Rhys: I know we have 15 total and I have them all laid out here. So 15, 14, 13, 12, we are on 11.
Stephen: Okay. I thought that’s about where we were at. So there we go. That was that. How’s that for our hook, man? People really want to come and listen to the episode now. Listen to us count
Rhys: backwards.
Stephen: Yeah. All right.
Let’s get going. Let’s talk about night house, which is it was a streaming exclusive or direct to streaming or however you want to do it. Correct.
Rhys: I think so. I don’t think it really actually had any kind of. No, it did. Okay. A small UN or a very forgettable short. Yeah, it was [00:01:00] $15 million in the box office worldwide.
Wow. So it was a very limited release. It’s by David Bruckner who did the ritual. And there are certainly elements of the ritual that you’re gonna see in this. Yeah, one of the biggest for me was once you actually know what’s going on in the movie, then you want to go back and watch it and see how many times you can count that the bad guy shows up just in the background and they don’t tell you.
So
Stephen: now that we’ll talk about this more, but that was one of the best. Things in the movie and a lot of it, I know, wasn’t necessarily just CGI with the way they angled things a couple times at which they could have enhanced with CGI, but, they, they did the shifting of perspective thing.
I love that. That was a really cool thing.
Rhys: Yeah. This movie came out in 2020. The ritual came out two years before it ran an hour and 34 minutes and the ritual was nominated for nine awards winning for it cleared 1. 7 million in the [00:02:00] box office. And that was mostly in the UK is where the run happened.
And it was bought by Netflix for 4. 75 million and you can still see the ritual on Netflix anytime you want.
Stephen: Yeah. And I was looking at, it’s called night house. If we combine it with earlier episodes, we could have silent night house.
Rhys: Yeah. Night house ran an hour 47,
Stephen: a little
Rhys: bit
Stephen: longer,
Rhys: And it felt a little bit longer.
Stephen: I agree. There, there was a little drag throughout it that something seemed to be longer just to be longer.
Rhys: Yeah.
Stephen: I really think this one could have benefited from 10, 15 minutes being cut out without Altering things too much.
Rhys: It was nominated for 20 awards and it won one at Fangora for best screenplay.
Nice. It was written by Ben Collins and Louis Piotrowski and they wrote it specifically for Bruckner. Oh, cool. They both went on and wrote the script for the Hellraiser movie that [00:03:00] Bruckner directed. Following this, that was his latest and the last thing that he’s done,
Stephen: right? Yeah. The one on Hulu, I believe, wasn’t it?
Hulu.
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah, it was
Stephen: one of them or whatever. Also do VHS, the original VHS. He did
Rhys: a lot of work on VHS, actually. He directed some, he produced some. So yeah, if you listen to what I was listening to interviews about Nighthouse specific. Uh, he’s like the interviewers were driving me insane because on the one hand you had this guy who’s Oh, I’m into a slasher movie.
So stuff like martyrs doesn’t even phase me, but this movie really got to me. And I’m like, I don’t even know what that means. And then you have these other people who are ridiculously pretentious. It’s my understanding that in the genre and it’s okay, you’re just interviewing him to interview him.
You’re not into horror movies at all. I
Stephen: think Graham [00:04:00] Norton really should do a lot more horror movie interviews. Yes. And the hot wings guy, put them two together. That’d be a show. Yeah.
Rhys: But, like they were asking him, why do you keep, you’re always doing these creepy horror movies.
And he’s no, I was a normal kid. I grew up in a normal house. Like his dad was like a paramedic and his mom was like a nurse or something like that. It wasn’t like there’s some kind of anything he just. He found scary media entertaining, but it scared him. And so in an effort to get past his fear, he really dove into it as a youth.
Stephen: Oh that’s interesting. I just did it because man, have you really seen the Christmas Hallmark movies? You want to talk about horror? Come on, but this all, this type of thing, you always, King always gets this. You see it in every interview with King and many other horror writers.
But. I remember an interview with Robin Williams wife once and they’re like, so what’s he like at home? How crazy is it live with him? She’s he’s a normal guy. Comedy is his [00:05:00] job. He basically turns himself on, does his job for everybody, which is it. Entertaining you with comedy and then he comes home and puts on slippers and reads the paper, and that’s horror too.
It’s just what you find enjoyable. And honestly, we both obviously have liked horror our whole lives, reading, playing video games, watching movies and everything. And. You go look at some of the other stuff and it’s just this is so boring, it’s just something in you that is attracted to it.
Why? I don’t know why people think that’s weird. Why it has to be out of the norm. Yeah. I never understood that.
Rhys: I think it’s because it scares them. And they don’t understand why it doesn’t scare us or why we would want to be scared like that. I don’t know, Steve and I both came from like the most vanilla bland childhoods anybody ever could have.
So,
Stephen: Which was, yeah, there’s stories we could tell there.
Rhys: So he did the ritual, which was written by Adam Neville. And Adam Neville had [00:06:00] another book called no one gets out alive. Which has been turned into another movie, which was directed by Santiago Manghini, but David Bruckner executive produced it.
So he liked working with Neville and he was, excited to get more of his work out there. So I recommend no one gets out alive. It’s good. It’s set in Cleveland of all places. It takes place in the winter. Might not be a bad time to actually put that one in now. I’m thinking about it.
Stephen: Yeah I was watching I was sick over the weekend and I ended up watching like a Episode of something and they were dealing with the plague and stuff and i’m like, yeah When you’re sick, you shouldn’t be watching stuff about people dying from being sick. That’s horrific
Rhys: Yeah he produced several anthology volumes.
Vhs 85 As well as siren, which I ran into an issue when I was trying to look it up because there are so many movies called siren over the years. But when I was reading the review and this is [00:07:00] hilarious in the review for the movie sirens, I’m like, if they didn’t rip the, if they didn’t pay the guy who wrote that episode of VHS.
When they made this movie, they should be sued. It’s the same guys. So it makes all kinds of sense. That’s the,
Stephen: that’s the new way of earning money. You sue yourself from past things you’ve done because you ripped it off.
Rhys: Yeah. And both of those were written by Collins and Petrovski too. So. He also directed pieces in VHS Southland, VHS 85.
He did the ritual and the 2022 version of Hellraiser. He’s got one upcoming piece in pre production as a writer and producer called Fall into Darkness. He didn’t direct that one, but he was born in Atlanta. And he attended the university of Georgia, and this is starting to sound like that that whole thing that we had with phantom of the paradise, where you have all these super connected guys who all knew each other.
That’s like [00:08:00] Bruckner when he’s at the university of Georgia, he went to school with Jacob Gentry and AJ Bowen. There’s a movie called signal in which all three of them were involved with the rest of Gentry’s work. He directs a bunch of movies, but they aren’t the kind of movies that are on my list.
But AJ Bowen is all over my list because he was Victor Allman in house of the devil. The guy with the beard, he was also in Hatchet 2, The Horrible Way to Die, You’re Next, The Rites of Spring, The Old Ways, he’s in horror constantly. So it’s really interesting to me that those three guys all went to school together and have gone on to be involved in.
Stephen: We’ve said before, if you’re going to do something that you enjoy and do it with your friends, all the better,
Rhys: absolutely.
Stephen: Plus who else do you trust more than the friends that think or know you and stuff, that yeah good stuff that you
Rhys: want done. So Nighthouse premiered at Sundance in 2020, and I think it would have had a theatrical release, but they held it back [00:09:00] because of COVID.
So the release it had was very short. And then it just, got picked up by streaming and, they’d missed their window by then. So, they tried to do this movie with as little CGI as possible.
Stephen: That’s nice. I wondered about that on some of those perspective shots the way I’m like, wow, that looks like they really lined it up rather than CGI.
Rhys: Yeah. And you can, yeah, you can, I think you can actually see where the CGI takes place. They’ll do this little thing where like you’re talking, they have the perspective and then they morph and then sometimes they try and push it a little bit. And I’m like, Oh, that’s where the CGI comes in.
Cause you know, they’re trying to add a little bit that you can’t actually get in real life.
Stephen: Which, we talked about that with Krampus too. Some of the things that don’t expect to be CGI are what is CGI and almost all the time, practical wins out over CGI. Most of the time.
Rhys: Yeah. [00:10:00] He wrote the character of Beth in this movie.
This is a movie, not unlike the last shift. Where you have an actress and she is in every scene because the movie is entirely about her. Yes. The handful, there’s a handful of scenes at the end that she’s not in to build tension. And we’ll talk about that when we get to it. But literally Rebecca Hall is in 99 percent of this movie.
Stephen: Yeah. And it’s obviously one of those that it’s psychological and you wonder what’s really going on or is she crazy, and I even said at the beginning when we get to the beginning, I said, it doesn’t really have a horror vibe when it starts off the dread and stuff build slowly throughout the movie and it actually got billed on streaming as horror thriller mystery, which really well,
Rhys: He wrote they wrote this part specifically for Rebecca Hall.
Oh, that’s she didn’t have to audition. All she had to [00:11:00] do is say, yes, I want to do it. So yeah, it’s a nice place to be. She plays Beth and she was super into the complexity of the character and the wide, almost uncontrollable rage that Beth feels, with the emotions that she’s going through in this movie.
And it’s one of those kinds of things where I appreciated the film. But I don’t think I liked it because I was uncomfortable with where she was at in her stages of grief. And that’s just me. That’s not on the movie or anything, but like she was at the, I’m angry at the world stage and she never left it.
Not until the very end of the movie. And that to me is I don’t know. I was just like, it’s not comfortable for me. It’s not a comfortable place to sit. And that might be a good thing. Yeah,
Stephen: actually, maybe that’s what they’re listening to this and going, yeah, that’s what we wanted, but on the flip side, Arguably weird, [00:12:00] supernatural shit starts to happen.
So where do you really get the opportunity to move on with your grief? You’re stuck there because of all these new revelations and ghosts,
Rhys: it’s true. And something that they did really well in the movie is that she is angry, and like challenging and everything up to a point.
And then all of a sudden she’s Oh shit. The floors dropped out from under her literally, actually, yeah, she’s stuck, I thought she did a great job. She was born in London to Peter Hall and Maria Ewing. And she has five half siblings and they’re all involved in theater one way or another.
Peter Hall we wouldn’t know him, but he’s one of the founders of the Royal Shakespeare company. That’s big in theatrical realms and Maria Ewing, she’s an opera singer. Rebecca’s the
Stephen: best horror directors and writers.
Rhys: Yeah. She’s married to Morgan Spector. He had long runs on [00:13:00] Homeland and that TV show, The Mist which I haven’t watched, but she has 50 projects on her CV starting in 92 with a few episodes of a show called the chamomile lawn.
But some of the stuff that she’s been in that we’ve heard of, she was in the prestige, she was in red writing year of our Lord, 1974, there were like a series. She was in dorian gray the town of the awakening iron man three the BFG, the dinner, Holmes and Watson Godzilla versus Kong, Godzilla X Kong, the new empire.
And she has four upcoming projects. Four days, like Sunday, Ella McKay, the beauty and Peter who jars day.
Stephen: And isn’t it interesting, actors quite often with us that they’re in some big movie and a lot of times actors like once I’m in these big movies, that’s all I want to do, but they, a lot of them seem to be like, but I’ll do these smaller horror movies and stuff.[00:14:00]
Rhys: I saw an interview with her and she was saying she loved doing this movie because she had just gotten out of doing Godzilla, shooting for Godzilla. And she’s it’s all green screen. You’re there in a suit and it’s all green screen and you’re not interacting with anything. And this was almost completely all practical effects, right?
So she was really, in place. So, Sarah Goldberg plays Claire, her friend, she’s Canadian actress. She has 22 projects. She started with a movie called a bunch of amateurs and moved on to other titles an uncredited role in the dark night rises Gambit. Lucia before and after the report.
And she’s been a key character on HBO series, Barry, which It’s a pretty entertaining show. My wife’s a big fan of the main star, but she’s got two upcoming projects, silent retreats and bubble and squeak. So the first one
Stephen: sounds like it might be horror.
Rhys: Not sure about the second one. Bubble and squeak.
I’m pretty sure is a South [00:15:00] London rhyming slang for something.
Stephen: Okay.
Rhys: I don’t know what it is, but if you lived in England, that probably means something to you. Hopefully someone will tell us. Yeah, or we just watch the movie and figure it out on our own or
Stephen: do a Google search. Cause that’s crazy how that can maybe help us.
Rhys: Oh, yeah. Yeah. The whole collection of the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. So true and not true. Yeah. Vondie Curtis hall plays Mel. He’s from Detroit. He’s married to Casey lemons. And Casey Lemons, interestingly enough, is a pretty successful actress. She had a really long run on another world. She guest starred on almost all of the shows that we watched as kids.
She was in silence of the lambs. She was in candy man, but she hasn’t done anything since 2012. I don’t know that’s a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong with taking time off, [00:16:00] but I just thought, she was very busy in the eighties and nineties. And then just as taking a break, Bondi’s got 89 projects on a CV starting with an episode of another world.
Maybe that’s where they met, but he’s been in a thousand things, right? Coming to America die hard to the Mambo Kings falling down sugar Hill. Clear and present danger. He was in 104 episodes of Chicago hope, which is a show I never watched. I’m assuming he is the doctor that everybody would know.
Stephen: He’s the janitor.
He’s just in the background. Every scene or them. Yeah, I did recognize him too. I recognize the
Rhys: daredevil. He was Ben Urick.
Stephen: Oh, okay.
Rhys: He’s got three upcoming projects, death by lightning, sheepdog, and the recruit. But yeah, he’s everything I, all the stuff I can think of, he’s always done a great job acting and he’s very distinct looking like when you see him, you recognize him right away.[00:17:00]
Evan Jonget. Plays Owen and I’m probably slaughtering that name. I’m getting it’s Dutch or something like that, but he’s from Pennsylvania. He’s from Langhorne,
Stephen: Dutch Pennsylvania, Dutch.
Rhys: He’s married to Zosia Mamet who has 50 plus titles to her name as an actress the one that we would.
Most know she was in Madam Webb. Oh, I haven’t seen her ill. I haven’t either, but he was in 36 projects, including X Men days of future past. He was in Bone Tomahawk. Okay. He was deputy Nick who very bad things happened to deputy Nick. He was in whiskey, tango, Foxtrot, a long run on the series frontier.
Archive 81 and the sweet bitter, he’s got two upcoming projects, the hunting wives and an old man in France. And I’m not really, I don’t know that he actually speaks in this movie. Like [00:18:00] something speaks for him, but I don’t know that’s his actual voice. He acts in the movie. He is in the movie.
He does. Full rear nudity, in the movie outside too, man. But still, I don’t know that he actually has any speaking roles, not a lot of lines.
Stephen: I assumed it was his voice, but I didn’t really think about it.
Rhys: Yeah. Cause the voice is heavily modulated. It’s pitched down, but yeah. So that’s the pre production notes.
It’s. It is a long film. And like I said, it made me feel uncomfortable, but it’s not poorly done, so it made me feel uncomfortable because of something in me and what she was experiencing.
Stephen: That kind of defines a good horror movie of this type,
Rhys: I guess. Yeah. I, and that’s the whole thing.
It was like. So when we watch martyrs, it makes you feel bad, yeah, we had a good discussion on that one. Did you [00:19:00] see, I sent you a review where the guy’s I’m rating this seven stars, mostly because I can’t think of a reason why anyone would want to go see it. It’s really well done.
So it makes you feel bad. I can appreciate this. This one is the kind of movie where I was uncomfortable. So I was looking for problems with it. And I really wasn’t coming up with any, aside from, it seems a little long.
Stephen: Yeah, and that, there’s a thing, if they had a few minutes cut out, I think it could have not that it felt peppier, but it would have moved along a little better.
I think some of the stuff was a little too long to get the point across. The problem there is, if you take too long going over things, People actually lose the threat and that’s where I started to feel with this one. I didn’t hate it, but it’s not my top movie we’ve watched. It was enjoyable and good.
And if you like, especially psychological mystery thriller types, this is a really good one to go watch. If you’re looking for Hatchet, This probably isn’t your cup of tea. Oh yeah. No,
Rhys: No. [00:20:00] Even though that one interviewer seen every slasher movie ever. And he loved this one. Okay. Whatever. Good for him.
Yeah. All right. Let’s talk about the movie. Break time. Okay. Let’s go. The movie starts out with this really great haunting buildup and then sudden, just quietness. And there’s just all these empty, lonely scenes. About the interior of a house. That’s been obviously lived in.
Stephen: Yeah. And that’s where I, I said a minute ago that the start of the movie doesn’t give me a horror vibe, the music, the shots, the way the angles were, it didn’t, it felt more like a mystery thriller.
Then a horror, which maybe was done on purpose or whatever. But for me, a little bit of that was like, okay, what is this? Am I going, is this what I’m coming in for?
Rhys: And there are little clues in it, right? Like a lot of them are pictures of Her and Owen, Beth and Owen together there’d be crumpled up [00:21:00] Kleenex, on a side table, that kind of thing.
So there are little clues about it. And the first the first we actually see people is through, we’re inside looking out the window of the front door, and there’s two silhouettes there talking. It’s very muted. You have to really struggle to hear what they’re saying, but it sounds like someone saying, Hey, are you going to be okay?
And the other person saying, yes, I’m going to be fine, but it’s really hard to pin down. The thing that I thought was really cool is the movie ends. With a silhouette as well, but it’s a magical mystery silhouette and these are actual silhouettes. So I thought it was like a nice little bookend.
Stephen: Yeah, that is nice. I didn’t really pick up on that, but yeah.
Rhys: And so Beth comes inside. I don’t know who was driving her. I don’t think it was Charlotte. I think it was somebody else who was bringing her back. She should have never been left alone. And that’s just me talking, but honestly, at this stage of [00:22:00] where she lives at this stage of what she’s gone through her husband’s dead, she just got back from the funeral and she lives all by herself.
In this giant house, that’s completely secluded from everything. She should not have been just left there by herself, but
Stephen: she definitely was not in the right mental state. And I think a lot of this beginning is where they could have cut back on some of the time, because by the time they really got into you, you seen anything worthwhile.
They had rehashed a lot of the, Oh, she’s depressed. Oh, all they needed to do was that opening thing. And she dumps the lasagna or whatever in the trash. That tells you pretty much everything you really needed to know about her mental state. And the funny thing
Rhys: is like that introductory scene of the empty house.
I really appreciated it. I liked it. But you’re right. It wasn’t necessary. They could have done that with three quick cuts, but I enjoyed the length of it, but then when you look at the whole thing and you’re like, this needed to be shorter. Even though I [00:23:00] liked this, they certainly could have gotten rid of quite a bit of it.
I agree.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: Yeah. She is living in a stunning house. And this was one of the first things when I was, when I had my backup about the movie, I was like, she’s a teacher. I don’t know how she’s affording this house, but then I started thinking about it. There’s a phrase it’s not complimentary among teachers where they will refer to someone as a carpet buyer, meaning that you’re only teaching cause your husband makes tons and tons of money.
You are just here to earn enough money to do what you want with on your own anyways, which
Stephen: isn’t a whole lot for a teacher, but no,
Rhys: right. Even my critique of what teachers don’t make that much, but it could go out the window cause maybe he was crazy successful. Yeah.
Stephen: They never really delved into his line of work, but he did build the house.
So that cuts a lot of the costs and it sounded like they may have inherited the land or something like that. It never, they never delved into it a [00:24:00] lot.
Rhys: He also has architectural drawings, like actual skilled architectural drawings. So it’s not like. And don’t be offended by this. It’s not like he’s just swinging a hammer.
Like he can lay the place out and that if I had to guess, that’s where you’re going to make your money. You know what I mean?
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like I do this for everybody else. I might as well do a good house for myself. She throws out
Rhys: the lasagna and we cut to the title card. And the thing that was funny to me is she throws the lasagna out after the title card, the next scene has her sitting there.
Not the next scene, but eventually she’s sitting there eating. Like lasagna. Did she dig it out of the trash?
Stephen: So I felt that they may have edited something and then added something and maybe that was it. Catch it. Yeah.
Rhys: Yeah. So we come back from the title card. It’s a house at night. She’s drinking.
I think she’s Brandy in my notes. I wrote [00:25:00] cognac and then she mentions later what it is. I’m like, Oh no, that’s right. It’s Brandy. She’s got this envelope in her hand. Or it’s a note. We don’t get to see what’s on it. But she’s holding it. And there’s this kind of tour of the house that she walks around.
What I forget movie we were talking about, or I was like, I would like an establishing architectural, this was it for this movie because she’s walking through the house, the cameras following her, you get a feel of where stuff is in the house.
Stephen: Yeah. And it was great in this one. And it does come into play a little bit with some of the architecture drawings and the house layout and all that.
But again, do you need 10 minutes of all of this?
Rhys: Yeah the next scene she is sitting there. We get the tour cause she’s getting another bottle. She’s got a whole case of the brandy stuff. Yeah. She’s sitting on the couch watching videos of the wedding night eating lasagna that it looks like she dug out of the trash,
Stephen: but she threw the whole thing away.
So it was frozen. It’s probably okay. Oh yeah, I’m sure. Not that I’ve ever done anything like that.
Rhys: I’m not above eating chips off the [00:26:00] floor. So she’s going upstairs, she’s in the bedroom. There’s a knocking sound. And that’s the funny thing about the movie is that it really it doesn’t waste a lot of time.
It just takes a lot of time as it does stuff.
Stephen: I can agree with that. Yeah. And I thought right here, some of the fully worked, the sound effects with the footsteps and the knocking were really well done.
Rhys: Yeah. She gets a knocking sound. She’s checking the doors and we get the first shot of nothing, which is the bad guy in this movie, that’s his name.
We get our first shot of nothing. He’s reflected in the window just as a silhouette. And as she moves away, the silhouette like turns and moves into the blackness. So it was just black on black, but you still can see it if you’re paying attention. She wakes up lying on the floor of, I think it looks like his work room.
Maybe. There’s a lot of times in this movie where she goes to bed in one place and wakes up somewhere else and this is
Stephen: almost werewolf like,
Rhys: [00:27:00] Yeah. She makes some coffee, she heads out, she gets to her car, and then she sees that the goat to the boat dock is unlatched. So when she goes down to latch it, she sees wet footprints coming up out of the lake.
Not out of the lake, but up from the dock. They’re muddy, bare footprints. She glances at the boat. So now we’ve got some sort of thing. She’s looking at the boat for some reason. Birds are flying off in the distance. Somebody died in the boat, maybe. And then we, she’s pulling into her place of work.
And this is when we find out she’s a teacher. She goes into one of those ridiculously mind numbing admin talks that teachers have to sit through. Charlotte’s there saying you didn’t have to be here for this. And she’s I really needed to get out of the house. And but that is 10 minutes into the movie and that is the first actual clear human communication we [00:28:00] hear.
The other conversation was super muted. Hard to hear. This is like the first time we can actually hear people talking.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: There’s a whole 10 minutes into the film. She is now in her classroom, just flipping through Zillow listings on her laptop, which makes you think, oh, she’s looking for looking to sell, looking to move and she dozes off.
She wakes up when someone comes in and knocks on the door. And she looks at her computer and it’s all listing of guns for sale, which is very different than houses.
Stephen: Yes.
Rhys: She closes it and you have this, I don’t want to say dream scenario, but like every teacher would love this. Cause some parent comes in and they’re like, yeah, blah, blah.
I have a problem with my son and blah, blah, blah. And then the teacher’s let’s look into it. And then the parent starts to get. Angry. And then she’s my husband just shot himself in the head two weeks ago. So you’ll forgive me if I can’t remember your kid’s last name.
Stephen: And the
Rhys: mom’s
Oh my God,
Stephen: I’m [00:29:00] so sorry.
I loved this parent because they were super, super superficial and head up their butt and concerned about things that. Aren’t as concerning as they think, and it really is reflective. I’m sure of a lot of parents in the world dealing with teachers talking with Shan, other teachers and seeing little videos and stuff.
It’s just really folks, this is what you want to go bust somebody’s balls about. Yeah. And some people just want
Rhys: to.
Stephen: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. This lady you’re obviously a stay at home mom because you’re, your husband makes tons and tons of money and you have to find something to entertain yourself with or make your life feel fulfilled.
Rhys: Yeah. So not only is this the first time that Becky, that was the lady’s name, Becky, this is the first time Becky’s heard about the death of Beth’s husband, it’s the first time we have as well. We sensed it, but
Stephen: yeah, and this again it was the [00:30:00] question that they hinted at it enough that you could start figuring it out, but then they had this scene definitely walk it home.
Yeah, but again, you dealt with this lady and it extended the whole scene probably longer than. It may be needed to be in my opinion, this is just the beginning was the slowest part for me. The first time.
Rhys: It reminds me of Astor’s work where he like loves to shoot super long and he hates to cut anything.
It felt like that because all of the shots felt I don’t luxurious almost where they’re just, they’re very comfortably long. Like we were watching the director’s cut. Yeah. And it. Not that they were too long in that moment, but they certainly could have been shorter. And if you look at the length of the whole thing, it could be, lost 15 minutes.
She’s back at home now. This was shot on the Finger Lakes in New York South of Rochester. And one of the things that Bruckner was saying about the Finger Lakes is it’s just this [00:31:00] massive expanse. Cause you’ll be standing on one side of the lake. You can see the other side of the lake.
But to get there like by road is just this tremendously long trip. Cause the lakes are just really long. So we hear footsteps coming up from the lake and we’re like, Ooh, is it something creepy? No, it’s Mel. Mel is coming up. He was covering the boat before it rained because there’s nothing worse than having to bail out a boat.
He tells him that he tells her she, they were a big help to him when his wife died and he gives her a hug. He offers to take the boat off her hands and she’s I’m going to sell it with the house. And this is the first he’s heard about her selling the house. He points out how peaceful and lonely it is.
And she looks up the step, she looks at the steps coming up from the dock and there’s no footprints, no sign of footprints ever. So maybe that was just all in her head. She had heard a gunshot in the morning. And I forgot, failed to mention that it was when the birds were [00:32:00] flying off and things, and she asks him about it and he’s Nope.
She thinks she heard a gunshot.
Stephen: What’s that? She thinks she heard a gunshot.
Rhys: And that’s the crazy thing. Steve and I live out here in the middle of the sticks, and you hear gunshots constantly. No one raised a good eyebrow. It’s not something that you’re like, oh, hey, did you hear that gunshot at 8 o’clock this morning?
Which one? We get this video of Owen. It introduces us to the fact that he built the house himself. Because he’s sitting there working on it. She points out he doesn’t have to do it by himself. And you have this really nice contrast because when she’s in the video, she’s all giggly and up and energetic and in present, she’s all just down and mad and gloomy.
Stephen: And it’s also, as you mentioned, As you learn things throughout the movie, if you do go back and watch it, some of these type of scenes take on a different meaning and different feel knowing stuff at the end.
Rhys: Yeah, she gathers up all these videos and a bunch of other crap and starts tossing [00:33:00] them into boxes.
She’s gathering his clothes, getting ready to take him to goodwill. If you can believe what’s written on the box, because it says goodwill, right? She’s getting rid of all this toiletries, all of his photographs. This is starting to feel more like a breakup than a she comes across this sketchbook of his.
She gave it to him, and inside you have these architectural drawings. I have tons of my old sketchbooks lying around, and maybe someday, after I’m gone, someone will flip through them and be like, vaguely interested in what’s in them. I’d be shocked if they did, and I apologize to anyone who does, cause I don’t know what’s in there makes any sense at all.
It did in the five minutes when I was doing it, but the vast majority of his are very dry, ridiculously neat architectural drawings. And then we get into these weird kind of circle things and these odd scribbles here talking about confusing patterns. And then we get into [00:34:00] we start to get into the magic of the movie.
And there’s two magical points to this movie. The first. He’s got mazes written down it. And the phrase trick it, don’t listen to it. And it’s not like a maze, like you would do as a kid. It’s more like a rat’s maze kind of thing. And he has the word care, Droya written down care. Droya is Welsh word.
It means the castle of Troy. But what a care droya was you would have these shepherds and I’m not saying no one knows why they did it or what they were used for, but they would build these mazes out of stones and things out in the wilderness where they’re sitting around watching their sheep.
And lots of people have, put out theories of what they are. Maybe it’s like a prayer circle or maybe it’s this movie’s got its own theories as well. They even have books about it that we’re going to get to later. And it’s in all honesty, no one really knows what it was. It was just a bunch of bored Welshman out watching [00:35:00] sheep with nothing else to do.
Stephen: And I figured you’d like the Welsh. Aspect of it. And some of these do still exist if I’m I’ve heard, yeah, they’re out in
Rhys: the woods and stuff. And the really odd thing to me is that they go as far South. There’s one in Northern Italy and it’s called a care Drea, which is the city of Troy, because the city of Troy was supposed to, the walls around Troy were supposed to be maze like so that the enemies would get lost on their way into the city.
And it’s what is this Greek mythology showing up? In the far West side of the British Isles, because people have tried to make a tie between the two. There was somebody, from Troy, from the great battle who like went up there or something, who knows,
Stephen: but I think it’s pretty obvious that Bigfoot carried the plans and delivered them
Rhys: That makes all kinds of sense.
And the aliens showed them how to. Make their lines and everything straight, right? They got those,
Stephen: they [00:36:00] got a compass, a big forest size
Rhys: compass. There is a sketch of the house that she’s living in. And then on the other side of the page is a mirror image of the exact same house. And there’s this overlay sheet.
That’s just like this dark crumpled thing. And it’s sitting in one spot and you flip it over and it sits exactly in the same spot on the other side of the house. And then the stereo suddenly turns on all by itself
Stephen: in these type of movies.
Rhys: It’s the theme song from their wedding dance. She’s alarmed by this cause it’s 5 33 in the morning and her phone goes off and there’s a text message from Owen.
And it says, come down and she texts back and says, who is this? And it says, don’t be afraid. And then the music stops.
Stephen: And this is another one of those things where it’s I had to chuckle because some of her reactions didn’t seem like they were really what people would do. So you question, is this real?
Is it a dream or whatever? She just sits in bed holding the phone. She hears [00:37:00] footsteps. Somebody’s downstairs. So I’ll sit here with my phone because now I’m safe.
Rhys: Yeah,
Stephen: well,
Rhys: yeah, she does the smart thing. She calls the phone. She calls his phone and someone answers. And it’s this gravelly deep voice that says go to the window and she goes to the window and you find Owen standing naked on the surface of the water out by the dock.
And it’s probably in the exact spot he shot himself because we do find out he took the boat out and shot himself in it. He looks back at her and she wakes up. She’s sleeping on the floor of the bathroom. So one of those
Stephen: parties. Yep. And I was wondering about that too. And I have theories of this with the whole movie, but I’m like, how inconsiderate if you go shoot yourself to go out in the middle of the lake in a boat.
That’s the most inconvenient way for someone to have to find you in,
Rhys: yeah, just jumping to the end for a bit. There is this, he goes, he took the boat out [00:38:00] into the lake. Removed all of his clothes, folded them neatly and set them on the bench beside him, but he had covered the entire boat in the tarp.
So you don’t even have to clean up. That’s really pretty considerate.
Stephen: It is, but now they got to drag the boat in and they do have to pull the boat
Rhys: back.
Stephen: But I have some, I can see why he did it based on what you learned, but at that point it was okay.
Rhys: She comes out of the bathroom.
She looks at her phone. Those texts aren’t there. It must’ve been a dream. She goes out and opens this box that was returned to her of police evidence. She like. Lingers on the gun a little bit and pulls out a
Stephen: cell phone. Would they return the gun? I don’t know. That just seemed a
Rhys: little odd to me. If it is, if the case is closed and it is a legally purchased gun, then you have no right to keep it.
I wouldn’t want the gun myself personally. She could have asked them to just destroy it. Destroy it. Yeah. Yeah. I’m surprised she didn’t. Considering how [00:39:00] she’s like throwing out pictures of him. Yeah. Yeah. She checks the text messages on his phone. They all line up with hers. Exactly. There’s no mysterious text that was sent to her from his phone.
And here’s the funny thing because the movie does like. It does this interesting thing where it introduces them as this tragic love story, right? And then all of a sudden it shifts to, Oh my God, this wasn’t a tragic love story. He was like a monster. And then in the end, It shifts back to the tragic love story.
Stephen: Yeah, he was like protecting her and whatever. So that’s a, yeah, some of those scenes she sees later are different perspectives or memories. And, yeah, that was, I thought was done pretty well, interesting and trying to figure out what exactly she’s seeing a little confusing, but
Rhys: Kind of a nod to audition where.
The guy, here’s one thing and you see it in this scene and then [00:40:00] you see it again from the other perspective and that’s not at all what was being said. Yeah. And here’s the first, Oh my gosh, he’s creepy because she’s slipping through his photographs. She finds a picture of a girl looking at books on a shelf.
It almost could be her, but she doesn’t own a shirt that looks like that. And she’s like a dog with a bone, gets her teeth into it and won’t let go.
Stephen: She
Rhys: wants a reason
Stephen: to hate him is what she’s really looking for. That is awesome. Nicely done. I didn’t even
Rhys: think about that, but yeah.
Stephen: I need to stop walking those police procedurals with psychologists, but yeah, that’s how I took it.
That she was really, and we got other scenes here where her emotional state comes out, which is again, one of those things. I think we had it well established, but they kept putting the same information back in front of us, which I don’t know if that was to confuse us or make us think one way and then give us something different.
I don’t know.
Rhys: It’s yeah. [00:41:00] I don’t know. It’s really interesting. It just is a little trivia note. The first picture that pops up on his phone of these two guys just hanging out, being funny. Those are the writers. They just slid them into the nice. She does stop on a photograph of Owen and he looks haunted almost weary, hunted kind of alert, frightened type situation.
She goes back to the school and she’s talking to Claire, asking her if the girl in the photograph is Beth and Claire’s I think so. And Beth’s I was calling her Charlotte earlier. I’m so bad with names. Her name’s Claire. Claire’s insisting, it’s you. And even if it isn’t, who cares?
Yeah. You could find, she says you could find far worse on your husband’s phone.
Stephen: And
Rhys: she said that like she had, something that happened, but she has a husband who we see in one scene and a child. Yeah. That’s a,
Stephen: they seem like normal. Yeah. We’re married. Yeah. We have kids.
Yeah. Life isn’t the best, whatever, that attitude.
Rhys: So Claire’s Owen loved you. He was [00:42:00] devoted to you. Just forget about it all. We’re all going out for drinks. Come out with us. So they’re all sitting around the table, the entire English department drinking. The administration gave them a book to read.
They’d actually do this. Here’s a book on, great things about teaching. And it’s okay, so we’ll read it over our, over the summer when you’re not paying us. Yeah, that sounds great. That’s gonna happen . Yeah. There’s a reference to the Dead Poet Society, one of, their English teachers are like, oh, I’m gonna have the students, I’ll jump up on their desk.
Stephen: I like that. Yeah. And for everyone listening, Reese’s wife is a teacher and I. Totally agree with some of the stupid stuff admin and parents expect out of teachers. And I re I always say we should take whatever we pay our politicians and pay our teachers and switch the salaries.
Rhys: I’m a firm believer that the politics was originally seen as a service because it wasn’t a great thing to do.
You did it for your country and it should go back to that.
Stephen: I agree.
Rhys: Where, when you get elected for [00:43:00] those two years or six years or whatever your term is. You should be glad when it’s over, go back to the farm. Yep.
Stephen: And I’ve said before, too, if we really want to fix our country, I can name how to do it in 20 years.
We give every teacher a raise and support the teachers to give the best education to the next 20 years worth of students. We’ll fix our problems. We
Rhys: can’t do that, Steve. They’re all indoctrinating people now. So I know that
Stephen: no one teaches anymore. It’s all indoctrination. That’s why I don’t ask Shannon to be on the podcast.
Rhys: Good plan.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: Yeah. She doesn’t like horror movies. That’s
Stephen: part
Rhys: of it too. Beth asked everybody if they believe in ghosts and Claire right away, being the doodle for friends Oh, I do. I believe in ghosts. And she’s there’s something in the house and it’s watching her.
And they bring up this concept of sleep paralysis, which is actually big in the horror community. And they’re like, a lot of times people who suffer from sleep paralysis say that they feel like something’s watching them. And she’s [00:44:00] yeah, but what happens when your body is awake and your mind isn’t, what do you call that?
The one girl’s like sleepwalking. Which is like the right answer. And then she asked if sleepwalking is contagious because Owen used to sleepwalk and they were married for 14 years and the one guy there is if you’re with someone that long, you know, maybe, but, it also could be like you’re also dealing with a lot of stress at the time So
Stephen: a little bit and right about this spot I started to get the feel like The mystery that was a mystery to her and us as a viewer actually wasn’t a mystery to her that she knew what the answer was and was like Guiding herself to that answer or wanting to get that answer.
She knew what it was and that kind of is what it comes out to be near the end in a way, but I just got that feeling like, I don’t know, just something made me think that way [00:45:00] during this with the way she was talking.
Rhys: Somebody quotes the, to be or not to be speech. And she points out that, that’s the suicide soliloquy.
You’re not going to raise my spirits by bringing that up.
Stephen: Yeah, this was actually a pretty funny scene.
Rhys: Yeah. And then Gary asks if she really didn’t know or suspect and she’s no. She was the one who always had the dark thoughts and had no idea. He protected her and maybe she infected him.
And then one of the teachers was like, did he leave a note? And Claire’s trying to get out. She’s let’s all go. Yeah, let’s get out of here. But Beth does she, he did leave a note and it’s right here. And she reads us the note. There’s blood still on a corner of the envelope. So, she pulls it out and reads it and it says, there is nothing you were right.
There is nothing. Nothing is after you. You are safe now.
Stephen: And I did think the note was pretty brilliant because of all the double meaning that ends up having here and [00:46:00] later when
Rhys: she first read it. I’m like, it means something else. I know, but I didn’t know what it meant.
Stephen: Yeah, I thought the same thing.
Rhys: And
Stephen: that’s why I started thinking she knows something more than she’s remembering or wanting to think about, like almost code, but he knew she would understand it type thing.
Rhys: She’s she’s there and she’s I want to know all the things that I didn’t know about him and all this stuff. Then she jokes about needing to get home. Cause she doesn’t want to keep the ghosts waiting. And, about here. You can tell for sure that it was like, oh, she’s in the rage section of her grieving right now. It was hinted at before, but this is like the first time where you see her just like lashing out, um,
She doesn’t know what the note meant. She really didn’t understand what it means. She’s [00:47:00] telling Claire when she was in a car accident, people would ask her what was on the other side. She says she didn’t remember, but she had told Owen and he was the only one. She’s there was nothing there.
And he was never convinced of that. He was always like, there’s gotta be something else, but. She was always like, Nope, there’s nothing on the other side. And then she’s holding the note and she’s the note is actually confirming what I’ve always said. So how did he suddenly lose his faith that there was something on the other side because the note was written before he was dead.
Asleep on the couch in Claire’s lap. And she’s suddenly awoken. She’s all by herself. The stereo is playing. The wind chimes are going crazy. And then the power cuts, she opens the door and she yells out. She’s do you want to say something? Talk to me. And she puts on a coat and a flashlight flash grabs a flashlight and heads out defiantly into the night.
She sees somebody running. There’s a girl’s voice. She chases after them. She sees a whole [00:48:00] group of girls jump, climb up on this fence. And jump off of this short cliff into the water. They’re completely ignorant of her presence. They run right by her. Like she’s doesn’t even exist. She looks across the lake and sees a house lit up and then she hears a voice behind her and it seems to say something about the boat.
But I couldn’t make it out.
Stephen: Oh, yeah, I don’t even remember because I was like, hold on. And by the end, I’m like, so what do these kids have to do with anything? Not really much of anything. I just I wasn’t sure what this scene was for and the thing with the house. I was like, okay, so there’s a house over there.
It wasn’t till later that they said, oh, nobody’s allowed over there. At first I was confused because I’m like, so what? There’s a house over there. It wasn’t established earlier that’s the forest area you can’t build in.
Rhys: It’s funny because after having seen the movie the girls who are jumping off of the thing are all of his previous victims.[00:49:00]
Stephen: Oh, I didn’t put that together. Okay. But I thought it was ghosts of children that were still stuck here or whatever,
Rhys: I think they looked young because a lot of them were just wearing a shirt kind of thing, the kind of thing that. Girls would do it to sleep over kind of deal, right?
She heads down the boat still covered in plastic. It’s got blood on it. His clothes are folded up in the corner. She walks back down the stairs and then bloody footprints appear on the dock as though somebody invisible is standing there, she whispers his name. And the fog seems to be moving around this kind of black shape.
This is another time you get to see the entity. And she asks if he’s with her, if you’re with me, show me. And the footsteps get closer and something brushes her face and she smiles at that touch and asks if it’s really him, reaches out and then is like shocked and starts to fall backwards and lands in the boat and the boat set sail on [00:50:00] its own accord across the lake.
She seems to be unconscious under the light of this full moon, which turns red and as the boat draws to the shore, it bumps and it wakes her up and she’s looking at her house, but she’s on the other side of the lake. So when she looks back, she sees her house. And she sees Mel’s house, so she’s, no, she’s on the other side of the lake, but everything is backwards.
And there’s someone in the upper window looking out with her arms crossed, but it doesn’t, it’s not her,
Stephen: she
Rhys: approaches,
Stephen: We get a lot of these now from here to the end with her seeing things, real scenes or what we’re seeing. She didn’t know about and there becomes a lot more of the, which is real, which is not, which is memory, et cetera.
Rhys: Yeah, she approaches the house. There’s multiple female figures moving through the house. All of them look hurt like her. Owen comes up behind one of them and grabs them by the shoulders and then they fight and she comes up and even her house number is like [00:51:00] backwards, like mirror image. She grabs the spare key, lets herself into the room, finds herself sleeping on the couch and her on the couch wakes up.
And I was like, it’s so cool. She’s being haunted by herself. Yeah. Yeah. So she wakes up to find the door wide open. She opens up his computer. And so it’s going through all the photos from his phone that are on that laptop. And she finds a cache that just has tons of other ones. And there’s lots of these pictures of women.
All who look strangely like her, but are not her
Stephen: right? This is one of those misdirections in the movie. Obviously, everyone’s thinking, oh, he was a mass serial killer that cheated on her with people that looked like her and then killed them. And she was lucky to get rid of himself.
They’re leading us to that. Obviously
Rhys: they are. And the funny thing that Bruckner does is that they’re leading us to that. And none of that’s wrong, correct. But it’s [00:52:00] not net for the reason
Stephen: it seems.
Rhys: Yeah. He was murdering women and cheating on his wife for good reasons.
Stephen: Yeah. And that’s what became crazy at the end.
Yeah. Yeah.
Rhys: This is what I mean, how you, it’s this love story. And then it’s some least procedural. And then it turns back into a love story at the end. I
Stephen: love you so much. I’m going to cheat on you and kill women.
Rhys: But he’s
Stephen: telling the truth.
Rhys: Yeah. She heads over to the other side of the lake.
She’s hiking through, she runs into Mel. She’s looking for a house. He’s it’s County forest land. You can’t build on it. And he tells her he really doesn’t want her walking out there on her own. But she’s not in a good frame of mind. Why don’t you come by my place for lunch? And she’s eh, maybe I will.
And then she just walks into the woods anyways, like screw you, dude. She walks through the woods. She starts to see trail marks cut into the trees and she follows them and finds this really crude, wildly unfinished house. This kind of based on the reverse floor plan [00:53:00] of her own house is still got tarps covering sections of it.
And it’s rotting and falling apart. It’s not the kind of safe thing. It’s the kind of thing that you should approach with caution. If nothing, one things could fall over too. You never know who’s living in there nowadays. Yeah. Not
Stephen: that we’ve ever been in a falling apart haunted house.
Sure. Watching curtains move and shit.
Rhys: Yeah. She calls out to see if anyone’s up there, and then she goes up the stairs, which is probably the bravest thing she does in this whole movie, trusting those steps. My question
Stephen: was, why was the house so dilapidated and falling apart? It seemed like no one had been there in forever.
Owen has just recently died, and obviously had been working on this, so I questioned why it was in such a bad state.
Rhys: I think because he wanted to build it in secret. So no one knows it was there, including his wife. And he, it didn’t have to be good. It just had to be enough to fool the [00:54:00] entity. And so he never bothered like sealing it up or putting, an actual roof on it or anything, and the elements will take their toll on that stuff if it’s not actually done.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: So that was my, that was just my guess. She goes upstairs, she finds this trash can in the bottom of it. There is a bound female figure with nails driven through at 13, going through several different body parts. She hears the floorboards creaking and there’s this big musical buildup and then a sharp cut as she walks to, as she’s at Mel’s house, pounding on the door.
She comes in and she asks him what the statue means and accuses him of being in on whatever in the world was happening out here. Now, this is another red herring that I really fell for. I was like, Mel is actually involved in something and Claire is involved in something. They’re not who they actually appear to be.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. They definitely gave that vibe. They wanted
Rhys: that obviously. Mel tells her that he saw Owen out there with women from time to time. [00:55:00] And He never told her because Owen asked him not to he said he didn’t think she’s equipped right now to handle this and she laughs and demands that he tell her everything he knows.
So he is he saw them on the path one day and called out when the girl turned, it wasn’t Beth. And Owen came back to his house that night, covered in mud saying he had embarrassing urges. He was trying to shake and he found a way to keep them at bay. That was the only time Mel ever saw anything like that, but she leaves on a snit.
Yeah, she’s not happy.
Stephen: Ticked off at him, which, understandable.
Rhys: Legit. Yeah. That’s, I was like, which is understandable because of all the information and everything that’s coming at her. And again, it’s that kind of red herring where, is Claire or Mel in on this? Is this some kind of cult thing?
She goes back to her house and she starts going through all the stuff she already had boxed up. The gun comes out of one of the boxes. And then she finds the book. She finds [00:56:00] a book specifically on Cara Dreyer, which, oh my God, that book should be like 12 pages long. Here’s this cool thing that we found.
No one knows why this is like a big thick bound book. Yeah, she starts flipping through it and she comes across the second magical thing that actually does exist. And that’s the Louvre doll. And in reality, the Louvre doll was a doll that was found, I think, in Egypt in about 800 AD. It’s called the Louvre doll because that’s where it resides now.
It’s in the Louvre. But they found it inside of a container with a spell written on it. A binding spell and it basically was some guy who was in love with some woman. And so he has this spell written and this statuette made. And when she touches the statue the spell goes off and she’s bound to him.
Ocean number nine didn’t work. And the binding spell is just like the most misogynistic thing you’ve ever [00:57:00] read. It’s may she not be able to breathe? Hey may she be in pain all the time that she is away from me that she may succumb to me and serve me. And it’s just like all of this. I want her to be my wench, so you should punish her until she is.
Stephen: So that’s
Rhys: the that’s the actual one.
Stephen: He should have just had a club plunked her on the head and drug her to the cave.
Rhys: So that what she finds in the book is a photograph of the actual Louvre doll. And it’s the same as the thing that was in the house, which has is basically a woman. Kneeling with like her hands bound behind her probably to her ankles and then 13 different spikes through her body. It’s not pleasant.
It doesn’t look nice. So you go through and it’s it says that the binding with the Louvre dolls will weaken dark [00:58:00] forces. There’s no historical evidence for any of that, okay. So always make sure you stamp your books. So when you’re gone, people can flip through them and find out where you bought them all.
This book is stamped from the bookstore where he bought it. She hears footsteps upstairs. She goes upstairs and she sees like this negative space that almost looks like a silhouette of somebody, but it’s actually just like the actual. Pillars in the house.
Stephen: Yeah. The edges and the way they form are in her perspective.
Rhys: Later in the movie, they move, but they don’t right now. She sees it. So she’s driving to the bookstore. And it’s your typical kind of independent bookstore. And they’re like, we don’t keep records about that. Blah, blah, blah. It’d been completely not helpful. But then she sees one of her doppelgangers it’s Madeline who seems quite frightened at first when Beth points out that she was sleeping with her husband.
And Beth’s [00:59:00] Oh, you don’t have to worry. It’s all done. Shot himself in the head. Madeline insists that they never did sleep together, but now Beth is at Claire’s house and it’s dinner at Claire’s and Beth wonders what he was doing with all these women and Claire’s just drop it. And again, it makes Claire seem like, we’re protecting something. Yeah. And Beth, like I felt him and Claire asked her to stay and she’s no, she wants to see this through. And Claire’s not everything gets finished. You may never know what he was thinking, which is, a great point.
Stephen: Yeah, according to every other rom com movie, something like this, the women should be like getting together, drinking wine and complaining and bitching a lot.
And Claire’s just nope, drop it. Let’s move on. This is what makes it seem so weird.
Rhys: Yeah. Beth’s you know what? You’re right. I am going to stay with you. I’m going to go home, pack a few things. I’ll be right back. And Claire’s I love you. And Beth doesn’t actually reciprocate that.
She doesn’t say that back. [01:00:00] I think it’s probably something that she. Only selectively ever says or maybe she’s thinking Claire’s in on it too. Maybe she’s in the house. She’s speaking to the air. She’s I’m leaving. So if you’ve got anything to say, you need to do it now. And about the time she’s convinced that nothing’s happening, there’s a knock on the door Ooh, here it comes.
She opens the door. It’s just Madeline, no ghost, just this girl. She’s Oh, I’ve been to the house before. Cause Beth’s like, how’d you know how to get here? She’s I’ve been here before, but she had a dream where she was Beth and something was chasing them. And it convinced her to come and talk to Beth.
Wow, that’s a crazy dream. But yeah, she’s she didn’t sleep with him. She planned to Owen invited her out there and she went, cause she felt safe with him and he showed her the other house. He was really proud of it. He showed her the statue and asked her to hold it, which would, according to Bruckner’s physics, bind the spirit to her.
And then he held her and she [01:01:00] kissed him and then he like went to choker. And all of a sudden he was like tired and confused and he’s he couldn’t do it and he said he needed to end it for good and met. That’s the story. Madeline selling. This is what it was like with your psychotic husband.
Stephen: Yes. And I started thinking here and I wasn’t completely right. It was a little off, but i’m like it sounds like He was doing something and went too deep and ended up killing himself to protect her But that’s not quite what it was. It’s pretty close It’s a little close. But like you said what he actually was doing was even more I love you so much.
I’m doing all of this,
Rhys: Madeline leaves, they wave at each other. So they’re leaving on good Beth, who’s already quite inebriated, goes over to the other side of the lake in the rain, heads into the house. She’s we need to talk. I’m not leaving until we do. You called and I came and then she challenges him to come and get her.
She’s drunk. She’s [01:02:00] tired. And she steps on a floor board and falls through. And when she does, she discovers several bodies of women wrapped up in plastic under the floor boards.
Stephen: Yeah. That’s when it got really okay, something else is going on. This is a little too much.
Rhys: And that’s it.
Cause it’s oh, there’s this romance. Oh, he was actually a cheating bastard. Now he’s like a mass murdering, cheating bastard. She’s running home. She calls Claire. She’s trying to explain what she’s experienced. She doesn’t even know if it’s real. She sets the phone down and doesn’t hang it up.
It’s still on which reminded me of martyrs when you were pointing that out. She makes her way to the shower and she starts to take this hot shower. Everything gets steamed up and then the stereo comes on. It’s the same song. She leaves the shower and is completely dressed. Like as soon as she stood, not that I’m sitting there being a creep or anything.
It’s just most of the movies would take the opportunity, at least a towel or something. [01:03:00] She’s about to head downstairs when the music stops. She looks out at the dock and it’s empty. She calls out for Owen. She asks him to come back. It has this little breakdown, actually, in the room. She admits that she missed him so much.
And this is like the most standard, honest grieving we’ve seen from her throughout the whole movie,
Stephen: but when she did come out, like fully dressed, her hair was pretty dry to the stereo turns on, you think someone’s there. So I’m going to take time to dry my hair and put clothes on which made me start going, okay.
Are we in a real scene or are we in a memory as she passed out or, it was, it gave it, maybe they did it on purpose for that reason to make it seem like
Rhys: it wasn’t
Stephen: real. Yeah, I
Rhys: guess. That’s a good point. Yeah. She looks up and the word written, the word here is written like a finger in the fog on the mirror.
Not red
Stephen: rum, it was here. It was here.
Rhys: She wipes the word away and there are wet footsteps. They [01:04:00] approach, she approaches them and reaches out. In the space where this nothing is and her fingertips make contact with something. And I thought this was, these were some pretty cool effects.
Stephen: I, I put that too. I’m like, wow, that is really great.
The way they’re doing all this.
Rhys: Yeah. And you have this whole, it’s almost like ghost, right? Like you can see your fingers in dent and then you can see these hands run up and down her arm and she gets pushed against the sink and she’s Oh and this voice replies and says, I’m not Owen and all of a sudden it’s Oh, wait a second.
The bathroom door slammed shut. She turns around and looks in the mirror and she can see through into another bathroom. And I think that’s Madeline. I
Stephen: thought I couldn’t tell for sure. It was because with the fog and stuff, was it her or doppelgangers?
Rhys: Yeah. The door opens. Owen comes in and starts strangling her.
The girl in the mirror. He’s attacking her and he smashes her head against a mirror, which cracks on the other side of it, apparently. Then he looks [01:05:00] directly at Beth through the glass and attacks the girl over and over again. And then all of a sudden, in this bathroom, there’s an invisible force strangling Beth and smashing her head into a mirror.
She starts to walk away. She’s dazed. The bathroom door is open. She can get out into the bedroom, but everything is backwards. Everything is a mirror version of itself. There’s a sliding glass, there’s a sliding door and a little face poking out saying hide and there’s female figures in all these different rooms as she’s slowly moving past them.
Stephen: It’s like one of those time distortion things in the edge of a black hole. You’ve seen multiple scenes from other universes that are colliding.
Rhys: Yeah. You have Owen coming out of the bathroom. He’s dragging this other girl’s body. He ties her up in the same shape as the doll and then there’s this empty shadow like entity that’s watching and this is where you can see the silhouette of it and you’re like, Oh, it looks like a face and then it [01:06:00] like turns.
Stephen: Yeah, it becomes much more prominent and you see it more often here.
Rhys: Yeah, it was watching this. It takes notice of Claire and comes towards her as she’s running down the stairs. There’s another bedroom and she sees Owen making out with a woman and sees the entity there again, walk, watching. And the entity is literally just a black silhouette.
It happens to be nothing. The house itself is starting to morph getting all nightmare like hallways are getting long. An unseen force knocks her down and drags her away. Mirroring what Owen is doing to a woman in the other hallway on the other side of a door. Every doorway she passes, Owen is assaulting some woman strangling her or beating her.
And this invisible force throws Beth down the stairs. There are several times in this assault. And this happens all the time. Horror movies where I’m like, she would be dead, but yeah, there’s this Christmas scene, it’s lovely. It’s like this break in the action. There’s a tree of fire. Oh, and it’s [01:07:00] sitting on a couch.
We’re looking at him from behind. Beth approaches to find that she is lying on the couch with her head in his lap. He is stroking her hair and this voice comes in and it’s raspy. It’s a little above a whisper. And it’s you left the night we met, you left me. And she’s you’re not Owen. And he’s He is what she felt when her heart stopped.
He is nothing. Nothing whispered in Owen’s ear over and over throughout the years to get him to send Beth back to him, trying to convince Owen to kill her.
Stephen: So the entity actually communicated with her husband, not just her. It wasn’t, just her head, which is where most of these stories go, and this was the part that I
Rhys: loved.
The fact that it exists is. A contradiction to the fact that it exists.
Stephen: Exactly. It’s nothing that exists. Yeah,
Rhys: right. [01:08:00] She saw nothing like there is zilch there, but it is actual entity. So there wasn’t zilch there. There was something there and it was something called nothing. Yeah. It’s if you start thinking about it, it’ll hurt your head.
Stephen: Yeah, it does. That absolutely. And this is where it suddenly starts dawning. It’s wait a minute. What was Owen doing? Oh, he would. Oh, I see why he was. Yeah, it definitely that I, I thought this ending was great. And the twist with how, what it was doing, I thought that was wonderful.
Rhys: The entity is like, Oh, and just what couldn’t do it.
And you can see like the figure of Owen on the couch starts to cry. And so Owen figured that he could trick it and he did over and over again, by bringing women back, binding them to him with the Louvre doll in the mirror image of the house. And it would take him over and kill these women, but none of those were Beth.
And so it was [01:09:00] never satisfied. He then begins to physically assault her like strangling her. And then he like forces her into the Louvre doll shape. And she looks up and she sees two moons. One is full and regular and the other is full and red and the screen goes blank. Now, this is the this is the reverse of the end of the dark tower, because at the end of the dark tower, King is here’s an ending don’t read on if you like happy endings.
So for me, this is here’s an ending. Keep watching. If you like happy endings. Cause for me, the movie should have ended with this next scene where Claire comes to the house, the doors are open and there’s no one there. Yeah. And roll credits. That would take care of the whole length problem, makes the whole thing mysterious.
And I was like, Oh, that’d be an awesome ending, but they keep going. [01:10:00] I think
Stephen: they help explain a little more, mostly.
Rhys: I suppose she’s looking around, Claire’s looking around, she finds brandy, dirty clothes, broken mirrors. She starts to panic, calling out for her. Bill hears from over at his way and he comes over.
And we can see we’re back to this place where there’s the two moons looking like eyes staring at Beth as she’s sitting in the boat on the lake under what looks like a full lunar eclipse, because everything’s red. And Owen is sitting across from her. It’s holding this note. His note makes all kinds of sense.
Now there is nothing is after you like the entity. So he’s sitting there naked. His clothes are all folded up. And Beth is sitting there with a gun in her hand and she asks, Oh she asked where Owen is. And he’s nothing says he’s gone, but you already knew that. And that’s that [01:11:00] whole thing about that’s where, like the whole thing, if nothing’s there, then you shouldn’t be talking to anything because there’s nothing right.
Claire’s running through the house. She sees the Louvre doll. She sees that the gun is missing from the evidence bag. And she runs that kind
Stephen: of struck me as really. She’s going to know that then recognize the gun is missing.
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. It was just a bag. She comes running out. She’s yelling. Beth is sitting there with the gun in her hand.
And maybe she heard Claire yelling in the other world because her head turns a bit and she’s sitting in a boat that’s maybe 10 yards from the dock. Nothing says Owen thought he could protect her, but he was wrong. And she was right when when she, you were right. He tells her she looks down and she’s holding the gun and Claire and Mel in the real world are all running towards the deck [01:12:00] and Beth’s there in the dream world, holding the gun and nothing’s like there was nothing there’s only me.
And they’re running down the 8 million steps from the house to the dock. It’s taking them a long time to get there. She’s got the gun holding it with her thumb on the trigger pointed towards her face. And this time she can hear Claire yell and nothing says it doesn’t matter. Come back to him.
And she just lets the gun fall in her lap. And we see in the real world, she’s setting the gun down and Claire is in the water, fully dressed with a cardigan.
Stephen: Yeah. I was pretty impressed by that.
Rhys: Pulling Beth out of the boat. So they can both drown apparently
Stephen: because you won’t pull her out of the boat.
You don’t want to try and get in the boat or drag the boat.
Rhys: I took life lifeguarding lessons. And one of the things you had to do was be able to remove your clothes in 20 seconds. And it was because when you get in the water with [01:13:00] all these on, it’s ridiculously hard. You just added
Stephen: 30 pounds.
Rhys: Yeah.
So they pull her out and they ask Beth if she’s there and she’s like there and there’s all these hugs and Beth looks out at the boat and Mel looks too. And this is the interesting thing. Mel’s what are you looking at? And she says. He’s what are you looking at? There’s nothing there. And she’s she knows, she’s I know.
And if you look at the boat, you can see a silhouette in the ripples on the water. The ripples are white, but there’s a man shape where the ripples are all black. And then they roll credits.
Stephen: And so I was like, okay, so we could take this as, is he now trapped on the boat? I don’t think so. Or does she now have no, what she has to look forward to with the rest of her life in dealing with him wanting her back, that evil entity trying to draw her back.
Rhys: And that was my thought too. It was like, this doesn’t end anything. It just saved you this [01:14:00] day because it’s obviously some ridiculously powerful otherworldly entity. And you did nothing to really stop it aside from now you can look at it on the positive side. We’re like, no, she overcame her grief and she solved the mystery and she’s turned her back on nothing and it has no power over her now.
But really, is that really how this would work out?
Stephen: Yeah, maybe she’s going to start finding doppelgangers and taking them to the house and killing them.
Rhys: And that’s why for me, it would have just been better if Clarence showed up at the house and it was all just a shambles. No one was there.
Stephen: It let us figure out what happened.
Think about it. Yeah, I agree. Those are usually the better endings still. All in all, this is a pretty good movie. Yeah, I was impressed. Yeah. All so what’s next on our list after this one we’ve been doing some public domain ones too. So we have some of those thrown in throughout some of this for people.
Oh, yeah. If you haven’t checked out our
Rhys: side dishes, by all means, you should take a look at those. Yeah. We’re going to go [01:15:00] back after the event that was freaks in the life of Todd Browning. And we’re going to watch the devil doll. Which is, I think, one of the last movies he directed, and again, he didn’t put his name on it when he did it.
It’s not necessarily a horror movie, it is certainly a crime movie with magical Overtones to it, which kind of interesting pushes it on the horror edge a little bit, but it’s from 1936 that probably was horror back then. Exactly
Stephen: different perspective on time or people in different times.
Yeah. So good. All right. This was a good choice. Good movie. We’re getting close to the end of this season. Once this airs. We’re trying to ramp it up a little this year, getting the side dishes on, trying to get a few more episodes out and get through season six, a little quicker than season five.
Rhys: Yeah. We’ve only got three more after the devil doll. Yep.
Stephen: Okay. All right. Hey, take care. It’s been fun and we’ll talk to you [01:16:00] later. All right. See you, Steve.
