- Directed by Mercedes Bryce Morgan
- Written by Leah Saint Marie
- Stars Morgan Saylor, Kat Foster, Myko Olivier
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 34 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJNPwELdysY
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
Strange is a good word for this one. Something will seem strange, but is that the only thing? Nope. This is a good one with an excellent script and great cast.
Synopsis
Millicent wakes up on the bus. She goes to a house and rings the bell. Rebecca asks Millicent some questions. Millie wonders about little Johnny’s astronaut outfit. Millie has no family, so she can be Johnny’s “family.” She doesn’t have much experience but claims to like kids. Johnny doesn’t speak, but he likes her. He’s allergic to just about everything, so it sounds really complicated. Fortunately, his medication knocks him right out, so he sleeps a lot. Millie likes Johnny’s shirtless father, Jacob, a lot too. Rebecca is weird and bossy, but Millie says she can handle the job.
Millicent, on the bus again, hallucinates a naked man with devil horns leaning against her. When she gets off the bus she takes a drop of some kind of drug. Credits roll.
We cut to Millicent at the psychiatrist’s office, and he talks about her micro dosing with LSD. He wants to cut back on the dosage, or she’s going to start having hallucinations. We hear that she was in the foster system for her whole life, and she has daddy issues. She tells Dr. Welsh that all she really wants is to be a better mother than the ones she sees in the park. She hallucinates some things right there in the doctor’s office.
Rebecca is immediately jealous of Millicent, but Jacob thinks maybe she’s too innocent. They soon have kinky-sex, but he stops because she’s a mother now. They stop even that when Johnny has a crazy seizure. Rebecca blames Jacob for giving him chocolate. Jacob insists that Johnny doesn’t have allergies; Rebecca’s just in denial about Johnny being sick in the head. He needs to be institutionalized, not coddled for imaginary allergies. He’s even found and talked to a place, but she doesn’t want to abandon him to strangers.
Millicent drops some more acid. Then she’s called down for breakfast with a strange man who seems to be her father; she denied having family to Rebecca. We gradually realize he’s not her father, he’s her “Daddy,” and he’s infatuated with her. He cries at the thought that she might leave.
Later, Millicent works with Johnny in his astronaut suit. He digs up a dead rabbit that was buried out there. She cuts off its foot and promises to give it back to him later as a lucky keychain. He brings her another dead rabbit, and she teaches him how to skin it. Where is he getting all these dead rabbits?
Millie takes more LSD and masturbates to a picture of Jacob. She hallucinates him killing Rebecca and making crazy love involving them both. She wakes up bloody.
Jacob gets a call that Rebecca’s not coming home as scheduled, and Millie overhears. The two of them give Johnny a very weird birthday party. They start to get romantic, but Johnny interrupts. Rebecca comes home and cuts herself with a razor blade.
Millie and Johnny bond in the park. She takes her time with him, and he does show signs of improvement. He lets her cut his hair, something he’s never done for his mother.
Millie notices that she’s out of LSD, so she goes to see Dr. Welsh again. He calls her “Mary Beth,” and she cries and acts up so he’ll prescribe more. Actually, she knows where he stashes it, so she just distracts him and steals it. She mixes it with Johnny’s pills—what could go wrong?
Jacob and Rebecca go out to dinner, and he sees that she’s been cutting herself again. She distracts him, and they almost run over Millie and Johnny in the road. Johnny calls Millie “Mommy” – he’s never spoke a word in his entire life. Rebecca doesn’t react to this well; he won’t call her mommy.
Rebecca wants to fire Millie, but Jacob says what she did was wonderful. Millie and Jacob get naked in his car. When Millie goes home to “Daddy,” he calls her “Emily” and talks about their deal. She starts getting all sexy with him, but she chokes him to death with his own belt. Then she dumps his body with… others. She reads diary entries about the men who have taken advantage of her in her big book of revenge.
Millie overhears Rebecca and Dr. Welsh talking about Johnny. The next time Jacob makes a move on Millie, Johnny stabs him in the leg with a knife. “If you want me to be part of your family you have to do something for me,” she tells Johnny as she hands him a pocketknife. “You won’t have to hide your rabbits anymore if I’m your mommy.”
Rebecca notices that Johnny starts drawing pictures of Millie and his father having sex. She screams “Do you like her more than Mommy?”
Millie has a long, crazy conversation with Dr. Welsh and herself in her mirror, and her instability becomes apparent to us when it pans back and we see she’s killed him.
Rebecca fires Millie, and Millie reacts… badly. Millie runs to Jacob out in the woodshed and tells him to fix things—after they have more sex. Meanwhile, Johnny stabs Rebecca right through the hand, and he hallucinates rabbits until she locks him in the closet.
Rebecca comes out to the shed and stabs Millie in the back. Millie runs to Johnny, who finishes her off—repeatedly, as Rebecca and Jacob watch. Jacob cuts her up with her tools and buries her in the backyard as Rebecca says, “If Johnny keeps this up, we’re going to run out of room; we’ll have to buy the lot behind us.”
Johnny still won’t call Rebecca “Mommy.”
Commentary
Murder, like everything else, is all about using the right tool for the right job. Sometimes a psycho child is that tool.
It’s very weird. Between the weird sex things and the weird drug things and the weird murder things, we almost let the weird child things slip by us. The ending is an interesting twist, but not necessarily out of the blue.
It’s very weird. I liked it a lot!