- Directed by David Bruckner
- Written by Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski
- Stars Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Vondie Curtis-Hall
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 47 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Tshycci2ZA
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This is one that really leaves you wondering what is going on throughout it, right through the ending. And that’s a good thing. The effects, acting, script, and everything about this one is a win. Very entertaining.
Synopsis
We get views of a nice country home on the lake as the credits roll. Beth comes in alone, carrying a cooked meal, leaving her friend outside to leave. She dumps the food, pan and all, into the trash. She drinks heavily and watches her old wedding videos. It soon becomes obvious that she was returning from her husband’s funeral in the previous scene.
There’s a knock downstairs, but when she goes to investigate, there’s no one there. Is that a man’s reflection in the glass?
Morning comes, and Beth goes out. She sees the gate to the dock is open and also what looks like bloody footprints leading off the end of the dock up to her deck. She then hears a shot and jumps. It’s just somebody hunting or something.
She goes to school for teacher training and sits with her friend Claire. Hunter’s mom, Becky, comes to see her to argue about her son’s “C” in speech. Beth tells her that her husband took a boat out onto the lake and shot himself in the head Thursday. Becky is suitably appalled and leaves as quickly as she can.
When she goes home, her friend Mel is there, and he offers to haul away that rowboat. She notices the bloody prints are gone. She mentions that even though her husband Owen built the house, she is thinking of selling it. That night, she puts his clothes in the donation bag and puts away all the photos. She also finds a book of plans for the house they built. The plans show off, mazelike rooms under the house. What?
Late that night, the stereo turns itself on and wakes Beth up. She gets a text from Owen, “Come down. Don’t be afraid.” She calls Owen’s phone, and someone picks up. “Look out the window.” She sees a naked man standing out in the lake—and then she wakes up. In the morning, there’s no record of anything on her phone.
She charges and checks out his phone, but there’s nothing there either. Except she starts finding photos of other women. Maybe. It’s either Beth or someone who looks just like her.
She goes out to drink with colleagues and says she thinks there’s a ghostly presence in her house. She mentions that Owen used to sleepwalk, and now she’s doing it. One of them asks if Owen left a note, and she whips it right out and lets them read it. “You were right, there is nothing. Nothing is after you. You’re safe now.”
Beth tells Claire later that in high school she was in an accident and died briefly. People would ask what she saw, and she always lied about it. She saw… nothing. Now she’s not so sure that there’s nothing since she’s been experiencing some weirdness.
Late that night, she’s awakened from sleep by the whole house shaking. She hears someone outside again and goes to investigate. Several women run right past her and jump off the cliff, but there are no bodies. She looks up and sees a house on the other side of the lake; when she looks again, the lights have gone out. She hears the word “Boat” and goes down to investigate. She passes out in the boat.
The boat stops, and Beth wakes up. She’s arrived at that other house. The house looks just like her house, and there are women in the house that all look similar to Beth. Owen’s in there too. She wakes up back in her own home.
She goes through Owen’s computer and looks at photos there. It looks like Owen was stalking a large number of women who resemble her. She asks Mel about a house on the other side of the lake, and he says it’s all National Forest, and they can’t build on it. Still, she keeps on looking, and she does find it, except it looks like it was unfinished and still under construction. She picks up a weird statue inside.
Beth confronts Mel about the duplicate house out in the woods; Mel doesn’t know anything. Mel admits that he caught Owen once taking that same route, and he had a woman with him. Owen told Mel that he “had urges” that he needed to fulfill.
She finds a book in Owen’s things on Caerdroia, inverted mazes, and they are intended to confuse or mislead dark forces. She goes to the bookstore that sold him the book. She meets Madelyne, the woman in one of the photos. She does look a lot like Beth, but she swears she never slept with Owen. What was he doing with all those women if it wasn’t sex?
That evening Madelyne comes over, saying, “I’ve been here before.” Owen invited her over and showed her the other house. He asked her to hold a weird statue and then tried to strangle her until she told him to stop. He then drove her home. He told her that he had to end it for good.
Later, Beth walks through the rain to the other house. She steps through a weak board in the floor and finds bodies down there. Owen must have been a serial killer. She calls Claire and leaves a cryptic voicemail. Then the ghost shows up; he hugs her. Then it says, “No. I’m not Owen.”
She then watches a reflection as Owen kills her lookalike in the mirror. It then slams her head into the mirror in the same way. She walks into the next room and everything is reversed. She then watches various scenes of Owen killing dark-haired women as a strange shadow-man watches.
The dark man says they men way back when her heart stopped. “You saw me, and I’ve been with you ever since.” He wanted Owen to kill Beth, but he wouldn’t do it. “He sent me them instead.” It then picks her up and strangles her. She watches as Owen sits in his boat and talks. “He thought he could protect you; he was wrong. Come back to me.”
The next morning, Claire comes over. She sees that Owen’s gun is missing and looks outside to see Beth sitting in the boat, alone with a gun.
Beth chooses not to end things. Claire and Mel help her out of the boat. Mel sees a black shadow sitting in the boat.
Commentary
This is really good. You have no idea where it’s going or what Owen was really up to. Is he a ghost? Was he a serial killer? Could it be something worse? Are Beth’s problems really over? Nothing was really resolved with the shadow-man; she didn’t kill herself today, but is it really going to stop?
The acting is good, and the setting is good. Everything is dark but lit enough to tell what’s going on at all times. The not-really-there-but-visible look of the shadow demon is really cool.
The ending is very ambiguous. The thing’s just gonna come after her again tomorrow, right?