- Directed by: Osgood Perkins
- Written by: Nick Lepard
- Stars: Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland, Birkett Turton
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 39 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1EeA-OihKA
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
A couple in love goes to his remote, and beautiful, cabin for a romantic getaway. Things seem normal. Then it gets strange. Then very strange. It takes a while to get there, but the payoff is very good. We both were very pleased.
Spoilery Synopsis
We see various scenes of women and then cut to scenes of some of them screaming. Credits roll.
Liz and Malcolm drive to his cabin way out in the woods. It’s a nice place; the caretaker left them a cake, so he starts making dinner. As she takes a bath, we see odd things happening behind her.
Someone’s ringing the doorbell, but it’s late. Malcolm says it’s Cousin Darren and his date, Minka, who doesn’t speak English. Minka nods at the cake and warns Liz about it. The unwanted guests soon leave. Liz is suddenly very suspicious of Malcolm, but he still seems nice. They start to make out, but in the middle, he decides he wants some cake. She doesn’t like chocolate, but he wants her to try it anyway.
That night, Liz has strange dreams. She goes downstairs and examines the rest of the cake, which she shoves into her mouth like an animal. As she eats it, we hear the screams of many women.
We cut to Minka, who is lost in the woods for some reason. She sees another woman, and she is attacked strangely.
In the morning, Liz draws the faces of the screaming women; she’s an artist. Later, she and Malcolm go for a walk in the woods. She finds a locket on a rock in a stream and takes it. Malcolm gets a call from work and has to go deal with it. She’s acting weird, but he doesn’t seem to notice. She keeps getting visions of bubbles and water.
Alone now, she watches out the window to the neighbor’s yard and sees a head in the garbage there. No– just her imagination, maybe. Then she sees Minka and also a mini-Minka. And wakes up from a nap after drinking.
Darrell comes over and asks about the cake. He asks if she feels sleepy. She goes to the bathroom and locks herself in while he grabs a cleaver. Is he coming after her? We see someone weird climbing the stairway, but it’s upside-down and partially dismembered. When she comes out of the bathroom, Darrell isn’t there anymore. Did something get him? She calls Malcolm and leaves a message for him to hurry up.
Liz finds a man’s wristwatch in the garbage disposal and then hallucinates a person with a bag over their head. Also, there’s another cake on the table now. She packs her bag and calls her friend for a ride; the phone loses signal halfway through, so she doesn’t know how that worked out.
Malcolm returns. She confronts him about all the weird people she’s seen. He searches the house for her, obviously not believing her story. He’s charming and all gaslight-y, so she decides to stay longer. After a while, his story continues to not check out, and she knows there’s something wrong again. She finds a photo of Malcolm with another woman lying on the bathroom floor, and it looks really old.
He insists that he loves her and didn’t want her to suffer, but he’s starting to tell the truth. “You’re giving me life,” he explains. The cake was supposed to knock her out, but it didn’t work on her. “They present themselves to you as women, didn’t they? I don’t know what they are, but I’ve known them for a long time.”
Malcolm tells her a story about when he and his cousin were children, two hundred years ago. They found a pregnant woman on their land and shot her before taking her prisoner. She ended up giving birth in the pig pen. The “baby” was… unusual. Now, he and Darrell feed them women regularly, and have for centuries. He talks about “their magic” shielding the place.
She runs upstairs, and something strange follows her. She climbs out a window and falls into the stream below. We flash back to the locket, which contains a picture of the original “mother,” who looks just like Liz. Meanwhile, Malcolm packs up Liz’s stuff and puts it in a room with a bunch of others.
Liz wakes up in a basement. There are some very weird “people” down there with her as well. They have a head in a honey jar, and they place it on a mummified body. They say they are her children, and also all the women who came before.
Upstairs, Malcolm waits for the screaming to stop and then goes to bed. He wakes up coughing; he’s older-looking now. There are screams.
In the morning, Malcolm wakes up upside-down, hanging from a tree, and he’s looking pretty ancient now. Liz comes out to him and says they’ve asked her to stay. She feeds him some cake. Then she drowns him in honey.
Brian’s Commentary
This started out feeling like an abduction-gaslighting-kidnapping story, and it was, but there’s a lot more to it than that.
The creature effects in this one really stand out. Those things are weird. The whole thing goes way off the rails in the final half hour, and that’s the best part.
It was surprisingly good.
Kevin’s Commentary
Things seem normal enough at first. Then they get strange. Then all is revealed.
I was expecting a sort of vampirism where he was feeding directly off the life force of a series of women over the years, but it’s a secondary immortality by feeding women to magic creatures.
I really liked the payoff and where the ending went.
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