A (0:28)

Hey, my fellow monkeys. What's up old Uncle Silverback here with you on the Arm Date podcast. The show where we review and talk about everything from guns, gear and movies to life in general. Nothing is ever out of bounds. As always, everything we talk about has the end goal of making our lives better by cutting through all the marketing bs, using logic, reason and honest discussions. I look forward to hearing from you soon and to your participation in the show. Well, hello my fellow travelers and my beautiful, beautiful fellow primates. What is going on? Today is Friday. It's the 20th of October, 2023. It's been a while since I've been able to get a show out to you guys. I've been having some behind the scenes problems with the website. The website will actually take the podcast. So if you were ever at the website, which is the armedape.com you can, you can play the stuff, but it won't, for whatever reason, the feed or something is messed up in the communication. I don't really understand why, because the podcast app that I use for my other show is the one that I'm using for this one and for whatever reason for the Armed 8 podcast. It just isn't letting it work. But hopefully by the time you're hearing this, I'll have had the feeds all sorted out and you'll actually have a show that I did not too long ago, which is called Alone, and then this one as well. All right, so the show we're going to do today. Oh, before we jump in with that, if you ever wanted to contact me or if you wanted me to read out an email for you, or if you wanted to record your own audio and have your comments played on the show, you can send that stuff to me at the armed ape@gmail.com. all right, so now let's jump in with the movie that we're going to talk about today, which is called the Lodge. This was filmed, I think primarily in 2018 and had some early releases and at some festivals, I think in January of 2019. It stars Richard Armitage, I think. Is that how you say it? Alicia Silverstone, Jaden Martell, Laura hall. And I saved this one for last. I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce her last name. Riley, is it? Keogh? K E O U G H. I'm not exactly sure. Anyway, the movie does something that very few movies do and it very early on in the first act, there's a major event that happens and this is affecting of all the characters that we're going to kind of go on the journey with. Throughout the rest of the film. So I don't really want to talk about that normally. What I'll do is I'll be able to talk at least through the first act and then we'll say, okay, let's jump into the spoiler territory. So with this one, I guess what I'll do is I'll give you guys kind of an elevator pitch so you would know at least what the movie is about. You have a father whose marriage has ended. He has two children. He has a son who is around probably 14, 15 years old, and then a daughter who is supposed to be probably 10 or 11. The father has a new girlfriend who is sort of estranged from the. The family. And what the dad wants to do is let's. He said, let's go up for the Christmas holiday. We'll go out to our lodge that we have, hence the name of the movie. And over the Christmas holiday, we'll all kind of get along. We'll try and iron out all our differences. They go up there, the dad has to go back to work for a couple of days. So he's going to leave him up there, head back and then, you know, go do his work and then come back. Well, once he leaves, of course, a bunch of weird stuff starts to happen. So that's kind of the. What would we call it, the lead in, I guess, to get you. To get you interested in it without giving away too much. There's a little bit of spoilery stuff there, but not much. It's a slow burn and it has some very sort of surreal elements. And we'll talk more about that in the spoiler section, which is actually going to be coming up here in about a minute. So I would recommend the movie. I think it's interesting as of the date of this recording, which again is the 20th of October in 2023, it is showing on Max, which used to be HBO. Max, which used to be HBO Go, which used to be HBO. So, all right, what I will do if I remember. So you'll hopefully hear some music here in a couple of seconds. Then we'll jump in with this spoiler discussion of this movie. All right, we'll be back in just a second. So the movie opens up on the interior of what you think at first is like, is this one of these, like, toy filters? But it actually is on the interior of a dollhouse. It shows a religious painting of which I think is maybe the kind of like. Oh, like a Renaissance period or something like that of, of Mary. And there's also a loaded revolver on a table. Then what we hear is, we hear Alicia Silverstone's character and in the movie her name is Laura Hall. She is married to Richard and then her two kids are. The boy is Aiden and then the girl is Mia. And then Richard's girlfriend slash coming up fiance is. Her name is Grace Martel, I think that's what it is. Or Marshall. Grace Marshall, I think that's what it is. So again we hear Laura kind of calling out. She's like, aiden, Mia, come on, let's get ready. We gotta go. The dollhouse is in Mia's room and Laura is in there. She picks up a doll, a small little doll and she takes it with her for Mia. What we find out a little bit later is that the dollhouse that Mia has is sort of a small scale version of the, of the lodge where they end up. Later we cut to Laura and she's in the bathroom and she's kind of like straighten herself out. She looks like she's getting ready to go to church or go out or something like that, you know, because her hair is done, she's got a nice dress on and she's kind of looking at herself in the bathroom. And then she's starting to cry, but she is trying to like kind of hold everything together. Then we cut to, we see that little doll is sort of hanging out the, the window of a car as they're driving down the road. We get an interior shot and we see Mia and Aiden are in the backseat and they're kind of goofing around. And then Aiden grabs the, the doll's arm and it pops off, but it can pop right back in. And they joke about, oh, you're lucky, that thing can pop back in. But so you. What it shows is that they've got like a good kind of playful relationship and that they're close. They're not, they're not really going head to head or at odds with each other. So as they're driving, Mia looks up and she sees that her mom, like, you know, you can look from the backseat and you see in the mirror, she sees that Laura is putting on some lipstick and Mia kind of frowns a little bit. And then she asks, is she going to be there meaning for Grace? And Laura says no. And then Mia whispers kind of like under her breath. She's like, she's such a retard. And then Laura looks back kind of at her in the mirror. She can hear it, but she doesn't Correct her. She just kind of makes like, kind of like, like, oh, almost like a rye or kind of a. Maybe more of like a resound face, something like that. They pull up to Richard's house and Laura the. From the front you have sort of like the. It's a two story thing and you've got like maybe like kind of a garage up front. And then upstairs you can see and the windows are open and you kind. You see somebody's up there, but you can't really tell who it is. And so Laura has kind of like a confused look on her face because she can tell it's not Richard. She gets a kind of a confused look because she's like, who is that? Because she doesn't expect anybody to be there except Richard. The kids go up, they run up, they're like, have like a real friendly greeting. They're happy to see him again. There's not really any open animosity or anything like that. There's no hostility. What he does is he says, hey, here's some money. You know, walk down to the store, get some candy or something like that. And as they're leaving, Laura says to him, okay, well what does that mean? And they're like, you know, no, this, no preservatives, no da, da, da. And so they take off and there is a lot of stuff going on. And probably in this first act I'm gonna go into pretty good detail about what's going on. Then later on we may kind of. Oh, not gloss over, but we may kind of just kind of hit some of the high points because I don't think I'll need to go as in as much detail as I'm gonna go now. But it's very, very interesting, especially on, for me, for my second watch, to sort of see some of the emotional stuff that's happening and what's kind of playing through. So Laura has the kids bags because she's dropping the kids off back over to Richard and they're going to be with him for a little bit, you know, for whatever the time is. As she starts to go in, Richard is like, oh, can I take that from you? And she doesn't even acknowledge, she just kind of walks in and he's just kind of like, okay, like, oh, you know, here we go again. And you can tell that Laura, she knows something's up and she's kind of like, you can see, you can see sort of the thoughts or the wheels turning in her head and she's like, what's, you know, what's going on. So she's trying to figure out some stuff. They kind of walk through his house and they walk around the corner where the kitchen is, and over by the sink on the counter, you see there's like an empty bottle of wine. There's two wine glasses. There's some dishes and some stuff. And you can tell, like, oh, you know, somebody was here for dinner. This, that and the other thing. What, like what Richard tells her. He's like, oh, don't, you know, don't worry, she's not here. He starts to. He's like moving some dishes around or something. Then he. He gets a. A glass of water and he puts like an Alka Seltzer tab or an anti acid tab in there. So you can tell he's maybe a little hungover or he feels a little worse for the wear from all the looks. Like they drink, like all the wine and stuff. The other night he also asked her, oh, do you want coffee or tea? And she's like, oh, yeah, I'll have some. And she. She is a little bit more civil there. But then he's like, oh, you know, all we got is instant. And so she's kind of like, ugh. He says, well, hey, we need to talk. So before. Before we even. And that sounds like. It's not much, but it's almost like one of those things of when he's saying, like, we only have instant now. Like, we don't keep fresh, brood around. That was kind of your thing, not mine. Of course, none of this is said. This is all kind of like maybe subtext. And so he's like, we need to talk. And he's like, oh, don't worry, she's not here. And then as he's kind of messing around, he's got his head down. She is looking out the kitchen window out into the backyard, and she sees the back of Grace's head go out through the backyard and through the gate and leave. And she gets this look on her face. It's kind of an expression. It's a little bit of resigned, kind of resigned frustration and a thing of like, why is he lying to me? And. And you almost get this thing of. There's a lot of subtlety in it, but it's also. It's real, real interesting, especially again, watching it sort of that second time you see her, like, is. Is he. Why is he, you know, like, choosing her over me type thing? This, that, and the other. So if we go. If we go back just a second, we can see that earlier when she Was like putting the lipstick on in the car. And when she was making sure that she looked really good and really presentable and was dressed really nice, like she could have come over in T shirts and a sweatpants or T shirt and jeans or something like that. Also, the time of year, it's probably, oh, maybe the start of summer, something like that. And so it's really nice and light and bright out. And that's another thing too. On the shot of the dollhouse, of the miniature of the lodge, everything is kind of dark and dimly lit. And then it contrasts with at Laura's house and Richard's house, where everything is kind of light and bright and well lit and kind of feels open and airy. Like I said before, Richard had put an Alka Seltzer in there. And he, he tells Laura, you know, we need to talk. We need to finalize our divorce. You know, we can't just keep going on the way that we're going. Which what that means is, is Laura wants to reconcile. And it also probably shows some of the hostility that the kids have towards Richard's girlfriend, Grace. And that I'm sure the mom has probably said stuff like, oh, I'd like to get back, or I hopefully maybe we can work things out one day. Again, none of this is literally said in the movie, but. But who knows if that's something that has been going on in the background. So again, Richard tells her, look, we can't keep going on like this. Grace and I are gonna get married in September. And so like I said, it's probably, oh, it's probably May or June right around in there. When Richard tells her this, that they're gonna get married in September, Laura has a quick look on her face and you can read it. It shows. She's having this realization like, oh, it's. This means that this is over. There's not going to be any going back. This is going to be the way it is for now and forever. That look on her face, that kind of stunned look and resigned look is only there for a brief second. And if you're not really paying attention too much, you don't really. You wouldn't really see it, I guess, or see maybe the depth of some of that. And then she just smiles and she says, okay. And she just turns. She immediately turns and just walks out and slams the door. And then he's calling out to her like, laura, hold on, hold on. And then the camera kind of pans down. Remember I told you he threw that Alka Seltzer in The water, and it pans down to the glass, and you see the tablet in the glass of water just dissolving. And so it kind of mirrors maybe a little bit of Laurel's, Laura's, excuse me, Mental state of. Okay, you know, everything is coming apart. Everything is. Is gonna change. And once it change, there's no way you can get it back. Like, you can't. You can't make the tablet resolidify. Right. Once it's dissolved. We cut to a scene of Laura, and she's at home. She's still wearing that same dress. Her home is very neat, and she's actually kind of straightening some books up on like a table, and she's kind of fussing with them and moving them around and stuff. And then she goes over and sits in the dining room. And it's, you know, you can see the green of the trees out, and it's really light and bright. And her house is like blues and whites, and it's, it's. It's light and airy and open. She sits down at the, like I said, at the dining room table, has a glass of wine, takes a little bit of drink. And then she's got a necklace on, which I think is maybe a. I don't even know what they call it. Like. Like, you know how they have like a St. Christopher medal or something like that. So she's got one of the relit. I think it's probably some type of a saint medallion. And she's kind of looking into her person. She reaches in and then all of a sudden she just whips out a gun, puts it in her mouth, and blam. And just fires. The blood just shoots up on the back of that really nice light wall. And of course she kills herself. And this, like I said, this happens quick. It's just, you know, in, out, boom. And it happens. And that was one of the things like, like I was saying earlier before, this happens probably within the first 10, 15 minutes of the movie. I know I've kind of yimmer yammered for about 20 or so, but for me, I was just like, what? I was stunned. I was shocked. And it's. It's rare that movies actually do that to where it really is done. Because what think is going to happen is she's just going to sit there and you're going to see her being really resigned to, like, well, this isn't, you know, what I want to have happen, blah, blah, blah, and maybe there'll be some later tension on with, you know, the kids and Pitting against, you know, Grace and all this other stuff. So it then cuts from that to a shot of the dollhouse. And we see three dolls, which I think in the dollhouse of the lodge. I think the three dolls are supposed to be Aiden, Mia and Grace. And the dolls, like the Mia doll is kind of knocked over on this couch. The Aiden doll has its feet on the couch and its head on the floor. And then maybe the Grace doll has its. Is laying on the floor facing a fireplace. So we then dissolve. It kind of dissolves out of that. And it cuts to Mia is holding a blonde doll that is wearing a little blue dress. So it looks a lot like Laura. And it looks like what. What she had was wearing when she killed herself. They are at the funeral. As the camera kind of pans out, we start up on Mia. It pans over next to Aiden. And sitting next to him is their dad is Richard. Aiden takes Mia's hand, holds her hand to comfort her. And I think. And it shows later, but I'm pretty sure Aiden has a. You see on the outside of his shirt, a medallion, like, again, like one of those St. Christopher meadows. Meadow, excuse me, medals. There we go. And I think that was. Is probably his mother's medallion that he has. I don't even know if that's the right term for it. Maybe it's just supposed to be called metal. There are a lot of religious themes and religious. I guess we call it iconography. Throughout the. Throughout the film we cut to. Everyone is gathered outside. There's this big courtyard. And then as you look up, it's open. And then you see there's a cross kind of in the middle or kind of in the back. So if you were looking up, like, think of a big square. And on one edge of the square you'll see this big cross. And they're all gathered beneath that thing where it's open, kind of like one of the old Roman courtyards or something like that. So they've all got these balloons. Mia is there, and she's trying to tie the doll. And the balloons have, like, these little scrolls. Maybe they're like little prayer scrolls or something on them. So everybody releases their balloons. They all float up through that open area of the courtyard, around that, that white cross up against the background of just a clear blue sky. She goes to release her. Now she's still fiddling with hers as everybody releases. So she goes to release her balloon, but the weight of the doll is too much. And the balloon is dragged back down to the ground. And she, in frustration, just kind of rips. It rips off her prayer scroll and the doll. And then her balloon kind of floats up sort of by itself. And of course, this is a very kind of traumatic thing to Mia. So we then cut to that. And Mia is at Richard's home. She's in her room. She's laying on her bed, and she is just sobbing uncontrollably. She's crying. She's saying that she can't. She meaning Laura, can't go to heaven. And so what I think maybe part of what in Mia's sort of child mind is she was thinking, well, if the doll can go up and float up into the sky and go to heaven, maybe mom can too. And Richard is trying to console her. And he said, look, nobody really knows what happens when we die. Mom wouldn't want you to worry about that or cry over that. And she is just like, just inconsolable. He's like, you don't understand. You don't understand. Just leave. Just go away. And we kind of see over their back behind them. Aiden is in the doorway, and he's kind of leaning up against it with his head on the door frame. And Richard gets up to go out of the room. And as he leaves, he kind of like grabs Aiden by the shoulder and kind of pats and we. And then they both kind of turn and leave. And we also see that Aiden has. In his mouth, he's got like that medallion in his mouth. So I'm sure that's a way that he is using that object that was. Again, I'm sure it was his mom's. Is using that to kind of comfort himself. So they both leave. She continues to cry later. And it cuts to the next scene, but basically, you know, after a little bit of time is gone, Aiden come back, comes back into Mia's room. He's got his comforter and he's got a pillow, and he lays down on the floor right next to Mia's bed. And then he reaches up his hand again and takes her hand. And then they're just kind of crying and all that other stuff. And then it sort of fades out. Then what we see is we see a dollhouse scene that looks like it's Richard. Aiden and Mia are shown kneeling in front of the painting of Mary. And the painting is kind of down, and they've all like on an easel or something like that. And they're all kind of in that prayer position, you know, with their hands palm facing together and on their knees. And then it fades to four dolls, which I think is supposed to be the original family, meaning it's supposed to be Richard, Aiden, Mia, and Laura. And they're all eating a meal. And that's one of the things that I kind of wonder about with this, is when we see the dollhouse vignettes or scenes, the question is, well, what does that dollhouse scene represent? Is it showing the past? Is it showing the present? Is it showing future events? Is it showing, you know, all three of those things? Is it showing inner thoughts maybe of the characters that we see, maybe looking into the dollhouse? And I guess the answer to that would be, yes, it does. It does all those things. We cut to the next scene, and it shows some plastic turkeys hanging up, so it must be Thanksgiving time. And it says six months later. So, you know, that puts us again when Laura probably suicided right around in May, Richard and Aiden are having kind of a confrontational conversation. And Richard is saying, we should all go up to the mountains over Christmas and Grace will go with us. And then Aiden says, you know, like, are you crazy? What's going on? We're not, you know, we're not gonna do that. We're not gonna spend any time with her. It's all her fault. And then Richard kind of confronts, like, what do you mean it's her fault? You mean what happens to mom? What happened? What she did? Then he's like, you left mom for a psychopath? And he's like, who said that? Who told you she was that? And he's like. And then Aiden says something, if I can remember. He says, she was in one of your books, right? And so again, we don't get to have a lot of the background. We don't really know 100%. This is about one of the only indications that we get from the dialogue in the movie of what happened between Laura and Richard. And so I think Richard is an author, and he was doing a book on cults, and it. And this is again, jumping ahead a little bit, but that's where he, I think, met Grace. And then who. Who knows what happened. But I think that that is why eventually the marriage maybe kind of goes south. So it ends with basically Aiden saying, like, you. And then he walks off. And then Richard's like, aiden come back, you know, and then you hear the doorbell ring. Richard goes out, and we see them kind of in silhouette, and he's saying, like, ah, we just can't really do this right now. And they were going to eat out on the patio. And of course It's November, and I think they're up in Massachusetts. I think that's where they are up around there. But, you know, I know they're up kind of on the east coast and kind of up on the northern part, up around in there. So it's relatively cold. So, you know, Richard goes out and tells her. And again, we're just seeing them sort of silhouette through one, almost like a frosted window. And then it cuts to them that the three of them are out on the patio. And when you look at the table setting, of course, Grace was supposed to come over and have Thanksgiving dinner with them. There were four place settings, and the three of them are eating, and I don't know, maybe. And again, in my imagination, I kind of wonder, well, was this something that was kind of a tradition that they did with Laura, that they would sort of eat out on the patio, and if it was cold, they. They had, you know, one of those big, giant tower space heater things. But they're out there, and I don't know if maybe the space heater wasn't working, but they're all out there. Richard, Aiden, and Mia have blankets wrapped around them. They eat their dinner. Mia has the doll sitting in the chair where Grace was gonna sit, and she takes a. Like a water glass or something, and she puts some extra food in the glass and puts it down for the dollar. They kind of finish up eating. Richard tells the Aiden and Mia, hey, I've got to go out later. I'll be back a little bit later that evening. He leaves the house, and we see there's a. And then it cuts to. There's a dollhouse shot of the living room of Richard's house. So not of the lodge that we're going to be at a little bit later. And you see there's. There's. There's a TV kind of in the corner, and there is a still shot, and I think it's of Grace. It's kind of far away. There's a still shot, and it looks like she's got kind of either like an open mouth, big open mouth, smile where her eyes are wide, and you can see all of her top teeth and her mouth is open. Or you could say that could either. That could maybe be a scream. It's kind of hard to tell because it just kind of is on there for a little bit, and then it pans away, and the little shot of it is small. It's, like off in the background. So then we cut to. There's a hallway shot and the Open door. And it closed and it slowly closes. And what we see is that Mia and Aiden are in Richard's, I guess, office. And they're on his computer. They're researching Grace's time that she was in this kind of, like, radical extremist Christian cult. And you can see, like, they're accessing his files and stuff that he did all his research. And they're reading an article, and it's from the Boston Independent, and it's dated November 16, 2020. Or not 2021, 2001. There we go. So it's. If we look at when the movie was filmed and if that's when it's supposed to take place, it's been about 17 years since Grace was in this. In this cult. And then I froze when it had the article. I froze it and kind of, you know, went up and looked at the screen a little closer and read some of the stuff. And in that article, you learned that she was the only survivor. There was 39 people that killed themselves, including. And her father was included on that. And her dad was also the leader of this group. And then they click on a video, and it shows sort of like a partial sermon of Grace's dad. And he's. I think his name is Aaron Marshall. And he's talking about how everybody needs to repent of their sins and God is impatient and we just need to repent and move forward. And then he starts singing Near My God to Thee. The footage then cuts to somebody's walking down the basement, which we later learn is Grace. And you see a bunch of people on, oh, like, beds and racks and stuff like that. And she goes up and she pulls the sheets off of them. And this one lady has on her mouth silver duct tape and the word sin printed on it. And then she pulls. She goes up to another body, pulls the sheet off. They're covered. The heads are covered. And it's her father. And he has that same thing, sin on the. On the duct tape. So that cuts to Richard kind of walking back into his office, and he's like, hey, what are you guys doing in here? And they both, you know, kind of stand up, and they're looking totally guilty. And Aiden says, oh, we're researching a project for me, a school, because my computer is updating. And he says it just like that. So, you know, he's totally full of crap. And they look so guilty. But Richard is kind of like, okay. He's got so much on his mind as far as. He's so in his head with trying to get his kids and Grace to resolve that. Some of that stuff just kind of goes over his head. And I think under normal circumstances he would have gone, I call shenanigans on this. You know, you guys, you know, what are you doing here? Blah, blah, blah, blah. But he just sort of lets that go by, and he sort of makes his plea and he's like, look, we, you know, Grace really wants to do this. I think it's going to be, you know, good. Blah, blah, blah, blah. We'll go up there. She's got all this fun stuff planned. And they just kind of look at him and they don't say anything. It's just sort of awkward silence. And then we cut back to the interior of a dollhouse again, which I guess what we'll just call them, like the doll avatars. And it's that scene we saw earlier where it looks like Grace, Aiden and Mia are kind of all toppled over. And then in the dollhouse, you actually see these little sea monkeys, which are. I think they're like little shrimp or something like that. It pans out, and what you see is Mia and Aiden are whispering, and you're seeing them from the back, and they're kind of goofing around and messing around with the dollhouse, and they're moving stuff around. We see that the kids later are packing up a bunch of stuff. Mia's packing her backpack. Aiden packs a big duffel. And then we see them from the. We see Mia from the perspective, like, as if we're in the dollhouse and we see her go out of her room. And they've, of course, prior the dollhouse was over at Laura's, and now it's been moved over to Richard's. You see, she's also packing her little doll in the outside pocket of her. Of her backpack. What we have to understand, too, is there has been a passage of time. So when that last scene we saw where Richard was talking to him about when they found him in his office, that was that same day. So that was basically Thanksgiving Day. And now it's probably like December 20th or 22nd or something like that. So it's been almost a month. So it's important to note that there has been a big passage of time. So when Mia leaves, she takes this. You know, how you transport fish when you get them at the pet store in a little plastic baggie. And so Mia's got this plastic baggie with some sea monkeys in there. And in the car, she's kind of like tapping at the thing and the little shrimp that we see are the sea monkeys. There's three of them that are kind of in that bag. They arrive at Grace's house to pick her up, and Richard is kind of happy. He's a little preoccupied. He calls her and says, oh, I'm gonna go ahead. And she's here. You know, she's coming down. He pops out of the car to get her in. And the interesting thing about how they've shown Grace, we have only ever seen her either in shadow, in silhouette, from a distance, from behind. Even when she approaches the car, the front of the windshield is kind of iced over a little bit, so she's just kind of a blur. Richard gets in. So he. She gets in to the car. She's got a little white dog. Looks like maybe a little. Oh, what would you call those things? Like, a little. I don't even know what the name of the dog. Like, I want to say a Westie, but maybe that's not it. But anyway, she's got this cute little white dog named Grady. And she gets in the car, but you just see the back of her head. Richard pops in the car, too. His phone rings. He's like, oh, I got a. Go get it. And then he pops out of the car, and he's talking. And then finally, Grace turns around, and this is the first time that we're seeing adult Grace in an unobstructed view. She turns to face a kiss. She's like, hi, Aiden. Hi, Mia. And then the camera pops onto them, and they just kind of look at her, and it's. It's an interesting direction that they. They had these guys do because they. They sort of look at her, and it's barely perceptible nods like they acknowledge her presence, but they don't say anything to her. But it's also not outwardly hostile, which is. It's. It's kind of a neat little thing that the actors do, and it's kind of a test to their skill. So what they do is they. They head out to the lodge, and they're going from, like, the city to a more rural, like. Like a suburb, then to a little bit more rural area where the houses are spaced out, but you can kind of still see houses in the background to where they're going way out there. And as they're driving at one part, Mia. Mia is watching Grace as she's looking in the mirror on the visor. And then Grace sees her looking at her, and she smiles at her. Mia just, you know, kind of looks away and Then another part we see as they're driving up that Richard is looking over at Grace and he's all smiles and happy and he's like kind of in seventh heaven. And he's got his hand on her leg, on her thigh, and he's smiling at her. And then we see Aiden kind of from the back seat. Of course he can see. He looks at her and he's like, he sees what's going on. He's like, you know, like, like what's going on here? He's not too happy about that. So anyway, it takes him and they get. They finally kind of get out to the lodge. And as they're going out, they had to stop for gas once the kids fall asleep. So it is way out there. They are way out in rural Massachusetts probably somewhere, you know, I'm not exactly sure where. I don't know if we ever really find out where they, where the lodge is located. But they get there at night, they all run into the, to the lodge and they kind of leave Grace outside because she's sort of waiting for the dog to go pee and stuff. So again, you sort of see that nobody stays out there with her. So she's sort of still apart. She comes into the house, she goes upstairs to unpack, and you see that she's got some presents that she brought for everybody. You know, one's I think labeled for Aiden and other ones for me. And she hides them in a dresser. And then she's unpacking some of her other stuff from her suitcase. And she said, you see, she has a bunch of meds she takes and she puts them in the nightstand kind of in the underneath part. And she looks on the top of the nightstand, when she turns the light on there and she sees a picture, I think it's supposed to be a picture of Richard and Laura. And she just kind of looks at it for a little bit and then she takes that photo and she hides it underneath. It cuts to them. They're. They're gonna have dinner, the kids. Mia does like, you know, thank you praise does like a little quick blessing. And you see that Grace kind of looks at her and kind of like kind of open eyed, a little bit of shock, like, what is, what is this kid doing? Also when Grace, while they're eating, Grace notices the portrait of Mary, she, as she's sitting there, I don't know if she's stressed or whatever or because she's kind of being surrounded by religious iconography and some of that other stuff. It kind of is stressing her out a little bit. She gets a bit of a nosebleed. Richard is sort of eating, he's got his head down, but the kids kind of notice and Grace kind of reaches up and wipes it away and you know, it's not like a gush or anything. It's just a little bit of a nosebleed. When they go upstairs to turn in for the night. The lodge, while, you know, when you're watching the movie, it looks like it's actually pretty big, but I think it's maybe kind of wide but also kind of narrow. So all the bedrooms are upstairs and when they get ready to turn in for the night and they're, they're relatively in close proximity. Richard and Grace are in their room and they're getting ready to sort of quote, express their love in a physical manner. And they're starting to laugh and they're being, you know, he's trying to keep her quiet. They, Richard looks up at and sees the, the big cross on the wall and he notices Grace looking at it and he is like, oh, do you want to take that down? We can take it down. She's like, no. Because he understands, I think with her past and being in the cult and all that stuff that some of that iconogr has a real negative effect on her. And again, this isn't said, but you sort of have to take it from context. Is probably Laura was relatively religious and passed some of that stuff on to her kids. So a lot of the things that we see at the cabin and I'm trying to remember in Laura's home if there was a lot of religious stuff that was there. And I don't remember seeing too much of it. But anyway, a lot of the stuff. So like the old kind of Renaissance era painting of St. Mary, the, the big crosses, things like that. So anyway, they're starting to laughing and of course the walls up there are probably relatively thin. So it, it flashes over to the kids room and Mia and Aiden share a room and they each have kind of like separate like, you know, bunk beds that are across from each other. And they can hear Grace and Richard laughing. And of course they know what's, you know, what's up. Aiden is kind of like moving around in his bed and he's like, oh. And then Mia has her head, she's laying on her side and then she takes her hand and covers her open ear, you know, so she doesn't have to hear them laughing and all that other type of stuff. So anyway, the next morning Richard and The kids have gone out onto the lake and where their lodge sits. If we're looking at kind of like how everything is sort of laid out, like I said, they are way up in the woods, and their closest neighbor is probably two, three miles away. Then you have a giant frozen lake. And at this time of the year, the lake is pretty much frozen over. Grace is inside, and she sees Richard's out there shoveling. The kids are out, you know, ice skating. So she picks up some ice skates. I think they're hers. They may have been Laura's or something, or they may just been extra ones that were up there. She grabs a hat and she goes in there. And then she's using, like, a couple of sticks along the path that Richard has shoveled on the ice. And so you can tell she's not really, like a good ice skater. Now, it just so happens, unfortunately for Grace, when she left the house, she grabbed like a kind of like a beanie cap, like a wool red cap. And then the Richard sees her coming out and he yells at the kids. He's like, hey, go help Grace. And the kids run up there, and then they see in their face immediately change. And they're like, that's our mom's hat. And she's like, oh, no. And she realizes, like, ah, man, it's kind of like that time, you know, like when you're. It's like, what's the. The one thing that could go wrong? Like you're, you know, you've got a choice of three things to choose, and you. It's like, you know, the luck of the draw. You pick the wrong thing. And that's kind of what you can tell Grace is saying. She's like, oh, no, you know, I didn't know I took their mom's hat. I didn't know it was her mom's hat. And Richard's like, ah, it's no big deal. Aiden yanks it out of her hand, and then Grace puts it on her head. So again, it just. It. It furthers a little bit of that divide and a little bit of that hostility and a little bit of that thing of. For Grace. She's feeling like, man, I just. I can't catch a break. I'm always doing the wrong thing. So they're out there messing around. Mia has her little doll, and she's playing with it on the lake, and she's got, like, a little snowboard attachment on the doll, and she's pushing it around, and it goes up towards a fishing hole that's an open hole in the ice. And then Grace. And as Mia gets closer to it, Grace runs up and it's like, no, no, no, stay back, stay back. And then the little doll falls into the water. Grace tries to get it out. Once she does is doing that, the ice kind of gives way because it's been weakened. Grace falls in. They eventually pull her out, and when she comes out, she, like, the doll is kind of like caught on her clothes or something, and it goes up. So Mia runs up and grabs her little doll, which again, is sort of for Mia, like the. Oh, we'd use the word avatar before, but it's sort of like that symbol of her mother. So she, you know, she is very attached to that dollar. We then cut to a dollhouse scene of the kitchen of the lodge. And we hear some voiceovers, and we hear Mia's voiceover says, oh, don't worry, you'll be warm soon. We cut to. Grace is sitting in front of the fire. Richard brings. I think he brings her a drink or something like that. He goes and he makes a call, and he says, hey, I can't. I'm not going to be able to come back. There's kind of an emergency here. Grace goes up to her room to take some more of her meds because she's having, you know, some high anxiety and stuff. Richard comes into the room and he says, I'm gonna stay. And then she's like, no, no, no, no, no. Now, right when he walked in, she had just taken her pills. And she takes. And she's got her pills kind of hidden behind her back. And then she sort of tucks it into the back of her pants so that he can't see, because she doesn't want him to think I'm stressed, because if he. If he does, he's, you know, he's not gonna go. And she says, no, I can handle a couple of days. You should. You should go. You don't have to worry about me being alone. And then. And the only reason, I guess, that they do this is because it comes into play. Later on, what he does is he goes into the clot. He's. They're in their room still, and he goes into the closet. He pulls down a electronic gun safe. So it's about the size of, like, a big dictionary. And then he punches in the code. And of course, his code is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you know, enter. So. And normally you would never have a code like that. But anyway, they open it up, and it's an old kind of Single shot revolver, like the old Colt. So it's a six shot. And he's like, oh, hey, do you, do you know how to shoot? Have you ever shot before? And she just kind of looks at him, kind of gives him a little bit of a smirk. Now again, I, they are isolated, they're out in the middle of nowhere. But the, the idea of, you know, why he would show her the gun or not, you know, I don't know. Anyway, like I said, it's mainly there to, to be able to have it be used later in the, in the movie. They end up going outside and you know, it turns out she's a great shot. I don't know why they wouldn't have said, yeah, I'm just a great shot. One final thing, you know, with that gun deal, it's sort of a contrivance that you see with a lot of these in movies, a lot when they kind of. It's. So it's supposed to be a reveal to you as the viewer, right? That oh, she has some type of martial skill with firearms or she has some familiarity and oh, isn't that, that's crazy. But again, in real life you would, somebody would just say, yeah, I know how to shoot. I shot all the time, you know, so I, I don't know. And really, even with what happens later on, it's not like that this particular scene would, would be necessary and to have them to shoot and all this other stuff. So the next scene we see is there are getting ready, Richard is getting ready to leave. So everybody's out there. He's saying, okay, everybody be nice, blah, blah, blah. He says that Wendy from the gas station has a key if anything happens and the kids have Wendy's number. I don't, I don't know why this is even said. And I don't know like how they would get me maybe if they thought, oh, you're gonna get locked out because I'm gonna be gone for a couple of days. It would make more sense is to say like, oh, if you need anything, you know, the pipes freeze, da da da da. Whatever happens, you know, give Wendy a call. They can come, they can come and help you guys out, I think. And it happens a little bit later on where they talk about the closest neighbors are. Aiden says, oh, they're miles away, that type of thing. So. And you would also think, well, why wouldn't he just give the, give the number to Grace directly? Like here, I wrote down the number. So you know, I don't know, I think maybe is It a thing to where that bit of dialogue makes it seem like Grace is even more kind of that fish out of water. And she would have to depend on the goodwill or at minimum, the cooperation of the kids to be able to get something if she needed it. You know, maybe that's it. So he. He drives off. The kids go back inside the lodge, and Grace is sort of left standing outside again. So we get a little bit of a repeat of the. Of the shot when they first arrived at the lodge, and Grace was standing out there by herself with Grady, waiting for him to go pee. So, again, I think it's designed to have to give you the sense of, okay, she's alone, even though she's with these other people, she's alone up there. She goes. It cuts. She goes up, back upstairs, and she asks the kid. She knocks on the door. Their door is locked, and she's like, hey, do you want to help decorate for Christmas? She doesn't get any answer. She goes downstairs, decorates by herself. A little bit later, Grace and Mia are downstairs. They actually kind of have a conversation to where Mia talks about how she wants to get a dog. And then Grace kind of opens up to her a little bit and says, like, oh, when I was a kid, you know, we couldn't. We didn't get presents because presents weren't mentioned in the Bible. And my dad was super serious about that. And then she shares with her about that if that. When she got Grady, she did that once. She had kind of started to get her life put together. And she just. She doesn't go into super detail of it, but she says, like, when I started my new life, I got Grady as a present for myself. When they're talking, Grace is sort of sitting by Mia, and Mia looks down and looks at the palm of Grace's hand, and there's like, a little cross that has been carved into it. It's like a scar tissue. So it must have been something maybe when she was younger. And Mia kind of takes note of that, and she gets. It's an odd look she gets on her face. Mia then says, oh, hey, do you want to see what Aiden and I made for our dad made that. We can show you the Christmas present we made for him. Turns out it's a dvd, and it's a DVD of the past, Like, Thanksgivings and Christmases and stuff, where they're up at the lodge of when Laura was still alive. And Grace watches it for a little bit, and she's got kind of this sour look on her Face like, why the hell are you showing this to me? And so the question is, is this part of Mia and Aiden sort of messing with Grace does Mia? Because again, Mia is supposed to probably be around like 10 years old. So she may understand that it may make Grace feel uncomfortable or it may kind of be a little bit of a dig at Grace from Mia. But I don't know if she really understands like kind of how mean that would be. Also though too, you could look at it from a perspective of once Grace starts watching that and sees what it is, she does watch it for a little bit and then she just, she can't take it anymore. She gets up and she goes, if Grace had her stuff together a little bit more, what she could say is, oh, Mia, you know, you and Aiden did a really wonderful thing. These are memories that you had with your mom. And you should never let anybody take these things away from you. You should always feel, you know, free to watch these things and relive and da, da, da, da, da. And this is a way you can kind of keep your mom with you. But of course she is. So she's kind of stressed and kind of wrapped up in trying to get things to move forward, that she can't really use some of those maybe adult strategies to help cope with things. And we see this with the adults here that they are so sort of hyper focused on what they want their own stuff to be. You know, we saw it with Laura and Laura wanting to get back with Richard and have her family back together. When that doesn't work out, she kills herself. We see it that Richard, because he is so wrapped up into a lesser extent, Graces with this as well. They are so both wrapped up into having, you know, all the conflict go away and have it be the way that they want it to be, that they are missing certain signs or they're pushing too hard for stuff. And you know, we see that a lot in here. Anyway, a little bit later she goes upstairs. Grace goes back upstairs and she tells. She's at the kids room again and she's like, hey, I'm gonna make some food. They don't. They just ignore the door still locked. She goes downstairs and she's eating at the table and the way she's sitting, she's facing the portrait of Mary on the, on the wall. And it kind of unnerves her a little bit. So she moves to where her back is to it. And a couple seconds later she's just like, oh man, this thing is watching me. I can't Handle it. And she. She pops up, takes the actual portrait off the wall and puts it down on the floor. We cut to the next scene. She is in the shower. And from how I think it's supposed to have gone down, it's kind of a tub with a. With the shower pole attachment to it. And then there's the ring around like the mirror. When she gets out, the mirror has sort of steamed up and the door is kind of behind her. And she looks. When she goes and sees the mirror on the sink, there's a heart that says mom. You know, like a lot of times you'll do like a little smiley face or something like that in the mirror with your finger. And then when it steams up, the oils from your finger kind of keep it from fogging over so you get a little picture. And so she sees that and she's just like, ugh. And then she goes to wipe the rest of the steam off the mirror and she sees Aiden is just standing there watching her. So I. I don't know if what was supposed to happen is maybe if they did that beforehand or if Aiden came in while she was in the shower, it would be hard to. To say that he could be able to do that without her noticing. So it must have happened before. So when she spies him peeping her, he just kind of walks away. And she's just like, eh. She gets dressed, she goes downstairs and she sees when. As she's going downstairs, there is a little. Oh, so as you're going down the stair landing on the wall, as you're coming down, there's like a little shelf thing or something. And Mia has made like a little, I guess you'd call it almost like a shrine. So she's got her doll that's sitting on this little shelf, and then there's a couple of candles on there. And by this time it's nighttime. And so Mia goes down, or not Mia, but Grace goes down. She looks at. She's like, what the heck is this thing? And then she blows the candles out. After she blows the candles out, she continues to kind of walk around the house. She goes into Mia and Aiden's room. Remember, they're sharing a room. She sees them sleeping. And then as she's kind of walking, it's like she phases into a vision of the people with the purple shrouds and her, you know, seeing that stuff. She wakes up and she's back in her room, but she's on the floor. And so it's kind of like, well, how much of that was the. Was a dream. How you know, was she really walking around? What was she doing? She notices when she gets up that the dresser drawers are open and the presents that she had put in there earlier, they're gone. And so she kind of is looking around for him. She looks under the bed, pulls her suitcase out, and she sees those presents are back in her suitcase also, along with Mia's little doll. And she gets a look on her face and again you can tell she's thinking, is this Aiden kind of messing with me more or is this something that I did, you know? So she's a little bit perplexed and I think she. She maybe thinks, oh, I know Aiden's been kind of messing with me, so it's probably him. We hear Mia downstairs and Mia's like, grace, I can't find my doll. And so Grace goes down and so Grace knows where the doll is. Obviously she doesn't say, oh, it was in my room, because that's gonna look weird. She says, okay, well start looking for it. I'll help you look. And she. What she does and it's kind of. It's. Again, it's a, it's a. It's a good kind of level of acting where the actor has to sort of do bad acting where they're like, oh, maybe it's here. Have you thought to look here? Da da da da. She takes her over to the little dog, Grady, his little dog bed, and she's like, oh, here's your. Here's your dog, Grace. Grady must have thought that was a toy. Did you think that was a toy? And then Mia just, you know, grabs the doll and she heads out. A little bit later she goes up to her room and she takes more of her meds. And I don't know what type of they are. Obviously they're probably some type of anti anxiety and anti. Maybe they keep her more based in reality. She is outside talking on the phone with Richards and. But she can't get him. She's just getting the voicemail. But she kind of lies to him about how things are going. She thinks things are going well, I'm gonna make pancakes. And we're doing lotta da da da. A little bit later she's down making herself a sandwich and she. Aiden's down there and he's sort of listening to some music or something and on his headphones and she's asking him if he wants anything to eat. And he kind of ignores her at first. And then they get into a bit of a confrontation where One of the. When. When he's sort of stonewalling her and says, like, well, I don't want to talk to you. She goes, oh, you don't want to talk to me? You just want to watch me in the shower? And it kind of. Basically, it sort of shuts him down, but sort of not because he has so much animosity towards her. He's just like, yeah, whatever. Later that night, Mia and Grace are watching the thing. And then Aiden brings Grace a cup of hot chocolate. And she's like, is that for me? And he's like, yeah. And you kind of think, oh, maybe this is sort of a bit of a peace offering. And then Mia's like, oh, I'm cold. And she kind of goes, there's like a fake little cough. And Grace is like, oh, do you want hot chocolate? And she's like, no. Then Aiden says, oh, do you want me to bring in the gas heater? And she's like, yeah. On your second viewing, you sort of see a lot of little looks and stuff that are exchanged. And we're gonna talk about some of this stuff, like the gas heater, the hot chocolate, when they pack up at the house before they came out to the lodge. And we'll do that at the very, very end, but for now, we're just kind of gonna zip through the next scene. So she's like, yeah, I'll bring in the gas heater. So Aiden brings in the gas heater. He's got it set up, and it's on. And then Grace has her shirt kind of pulled up, her sweater pulled up over her nose. And she's like, is it always like that? And he's like, yeah, it always sounds like that kind of smells a little bit because there's. There's probably. A lot of times with those little space heater, it's. It's probably propane or something like that. And they can smell the actual gas. They. They end up falling asleep. Grace ends up falling asleep watching the movies. She wakes up, and she's outside in the snow on the lake. And the shot is. The way that it's shot. It's real. The sky is real dark. And then you have, like. Almost like. It's like a lunar landscape. It almost looks like she's on the moon. And she is totally isolated. She clears away from some of the snow on the ice, and she can see Mia's doll underneath. Then all of a sudden, the ice breaks through. She's sinking down. And then her dad reaches up and grabs her foot and Is starting to pull her down. And then she wakes up again. She's on the floor back in the living room. Mia is sleeping on the couch. Aiden's gone. She goes to get her phone, but the phone is dead. It's super cold in the house. She goes to try and get some water. The pipes are frozen. She looks out, there's a major storm. So it's snowing pretty good. She wants Aiden to go check the generator. And she's like, did you move the gas heater? And he's like, I didn't. I didn't do anything with it. The gas heater's not here. And she starts to kind of. You can. She starts to kind of panic a little bit. She's like, what the. What the heck is going on? And she's like, what. Where did everything go? Because all the Christmas decorations that she put up are gone. Mia is in the kitchen, and she's like, grace, there's no food in here. So all the food that they have in the fridge is gone. Grace says, okay, you got me. This is a joke, haha. But it's not funny. I'm gonna go up to my room. When I come back, all this stuff needs to be back. So she goes up to her room. All her clothes, all her stuff is gone from her room. Her meds are gone. She confronts them, saying like, what did you do with my stuff? Where's my meds? I need my pills. And they're like, we didn't do anything. She's like, we're the only people in this house. I didn't. If I didn't do it, you know, that only leaves you guys. And then Aiden says, why don't you ask yourself where all your stuff is? Because you're walking around the house all hours of the night. And then Grace kind of looks at him, and then she thinks, okay, they're still messing with him. So she goes up into their room. She's kind of tearing everything up, but there's nothing there. Their stuff is gone. All their. Their clothes are gone. Everything's gone. They come down. Grady is gone. He's not in the house. So they go out and there's a. They go outside and they're all calling for Grady. They've all got their kind of huddled up with blankets over them, and they're yelling for Grady, but he's just gone. They come back into the house. Aiden is back in them within the kitchen. He's like, hey, there's no. The generator's gone. We got no power. I don't the generator is not working, and I don't know why. So one of the reasons why they have the blankets over them is when all their stuff is gone, like, their coats, their hats, all that stuff is just gone. It's like the house has been kind of emptied out. The next thing we cut to is they're all three down in the dining room, and they're eating some. It looks like maybe chili and crackers. I don't know if they're eating it cold. Anyway, Mia is kind of picking out her food. She gets up, and she's like, I'm done. And she leaves. And then once Mia leaves, Aiden says, hey, I didn't want to say this in front of Mia, but I had a dream. It was kind of like a. More like a nightmare. But in the dream, the gas heater malfunctioned, and we suffocated, and we all died. She's like, you know, no, that didn't happen. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Later in the kitchen, Grace is making some. Another bowl of chili, it looks like, and crunching up some crackers in there and notices that the date on the clock that's in the kitchen says January 9th. And so she goes out and she looks at the grandfather clock, and it's the same thing there. The date says January 9th. Now, it should be December 22nd, if we're going by the timeline of when they got up there and stuff. And so she resets the clock date to December 22nd. So the bowl of chili that she was making. At first I thought, is she gonna eat again? But what she was doing is she was making a bowl of food, and she puts it outside, hoping that maybe Grady will smell it and come back. She goes back inside, and she asks Aiden, hey, did you mess with the clocks? And he's like, no, why would I? And then she hears Mia coming. Some sounds of talking coming from upstairs. And so she goes up there. And then as she approaches Mia's room, she hears Mia saying, oh, you know, I was doing this, and I played with Grady, and I. Da, da, da, da, da. And then she. So Grace thinks, oh, she's talking to Richard. She goes in there. She's like, I thought, you know, you said your phone was dead. Give me the phone. And she's like, my phone's dead. And she's like, give me. And she yanks a phone out of her hand, and Mia's phone is dead. And Mia says, oh, I was. I was just pretending to talk to my dad because I miss him. So we cut to Grace Is in the bathroom. And even. And she's. She's gonna take what we used to call, like a bird bath. And so what she does is she takes a. She's got a pot of hot water. And they. It showed earlier that they had. They would put snow into this big pot and then put it up by the fireplace so that they. The water would melt. So she dumps it into the sink, into the bathroom, and the steam kind of boils up from it. And then the word. Much like before we saw mom with the heart, what we see in the mirror now is repent. She's kind of, you know, just sort of stunned and sort of taken aback by that. And then we cut to a dollhouse scene. And it is the scene of them where Mia is, like, slumped over on the couch. Aiden's, you know, avatar doll is. Has his feet on the couch and his head on the floor. And then Grace's doll is just laying in front of the couch. So it's kind of like a. Like a death scene. We see Grace in her room. She's trying to sleep. She sees the cross that's up on the wall, and she goes and takes that thing down and puts it actually inside the dresser drawer. Mia comes in, and by this time it's dark out. She comes in and says she heard a voice. They go into the hallway and kind of out through the house. They've got a flashlight, and they end up back in Mia's room. And then Grace is like, oh, the window is just open. And she looks out of the window and she can see down. And I'm not exactly a hundred percent sure what the pattern is supposed to be, but there's this kind of a. Like a geometric pattern. Like if you were to look at, let's say, a classroom and you were looking. Had a bird's eye view looking down, and you saw, like, the tops of all the desks. That's kind of what it looks like. And I thought. I. After I thought about a little bit. I wonder if that was sort of how the bodies were laid out when Grace went down into the basement and either set everything up or, you know, did all that type of stuff back when she was 12. And I think that's what it's supposed to be. Also, Grace is, I think, is starting to hear her dad's voice. We're hearing voiceovers of him like, oh, you need to repent. Let's pray. All this type of thing. Now, for some reason, I'm not exactly sure why she kind of visualizes in her head where the gun is. So she goes and she gets the gun and she's walking around the house. She goes into a room and she sees a shrouded body. She pulls the shroud back and it's, it's her, but it's the 12 year old version of her. It cuts to. And we see her then instead of being down in the, maybe the church basement of where all the everybody committed suicide of the cult. And now she's in Aiden and Mia's room and she's standing over Aiden, but she's just got like a blank zombie look. The kids, you know, wake up or see her in there. They're trying to get her to come out of their stupor. And she just in still in the stupor. She kind of goes to shove Mia off and it hits her in the head with the, with the barrel of the gun. They eventually get Grace to come out of it, but when she does, she doesn't really react. She's just kind of like, oh, that's kind of weird. She is back downstairs and the clock says January 9th again. And what she's starting to do is gather up some supplies. She's putting them into a bag and she tells Aiden like, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna get out of here and we're gonna go walk into town. And he's like, that's, that's crazy. We can't do that. It's too far. The storm is too much. We don't even have coats. We, you know, we won't make it. And then she says, well, I'll just go alone then. And then we have a scene where they, they're. They're standing kind of in the doorway and they're watching Grace walk away and they're like, don't go, don't go. And then Aiden kind of under his breath is a little bit like, you know, don't go, Grace. Because he knows it's dangerous. And I don't know. Even though we're in spoilers, there is some stuff that we're going to come across here as we're going linear, in a, linear fashion through this. And there's a significance to that scene. And I guess what I'll do is we'll kind of circle back around and we'll talk about that stuff once we get all the way through the movie. So Grace wrapped me again. She's wrapped that blanket around her, she's heading out and the conditions are just, are bad. And she, you know, go. Is gonna go across the lake. She Comes across kind of an odd looking house that almost looks like it's abandoned. And there's a weird thing, there is a shot of her on the inside looking out, but then. But she's not really in there. So I'm not exactly sure what that signifies, if that's a thing of, oh, she wants to be in there or something like that. But anyway, she's banging on the door and stuff and trying to get in and there's. There's nobody there. She goes into her pack, it looks like she's maybe gonna try and drink some water or something. But her. It's so cold out that her water is frozen solid. And then she kind of goes a little bit like hysterical and she's kind of throwing stuff around and it looks like she dumps all her stuff out, just abandons the bag and all her supplies and she starts heading out again. I had thought when I first, in my first viewing, I thought, oh, she knows that there's no help here, so she's just gonna go back to the lodge. But on the second viewing, what she's actually trying to do is she's trying to still get to town or to find somebody else to help her. And the reason that I kind of didn't pick up on that at first is as she's walking, she comes across her tracks from when she was walking out and she kind of gets a look of despair on her face, like, oh, no, like what? And so she understands. I've circled back around and I've been heading back toward the house. Now this does a couple of things for her. Kind of goes back to the thing where Aidan had said, you know, we can't leave, we can't get out of here. Sort of in a literal sense of it's just too hard to get out of here because of the weather. But also, let's say if it's a spiritual sense and if they are in purgatory, then they can't, they're not going to be able to leave until everything gets, you know, quote unquote right, or their repentance is full, so to speak. This is again playing into a lot of the stuff that she would have believed when she was in her cult days. And now that she, she hasn't had her meds for a little bit, some of those, what will we call them, maybe like intrusive thoughts or things like that are starting to come back. She is back at the lodge, she's kind of kneeling down out front, she has a nosebleed and she is looking Pretty bad. This next part is one of those things where you sort of have to suspend disbelief and not question it too much. She looks down and she sees some stuff in the snow, and she digs it up, and there's, like, some plastic flowers. There's a. Looks like a. Like a picture frame, and there's some candles and stuff. And so once she. And Aiden comes out and sees her, and then she goes back in the house. So once she's back in the house, she's inside her room and she's doing a thing where she's kind of like grasping at her leg, almost like. Sort of like involuntary. And I used to know the psychological term for it, but it would be like if a person compulsively scratches. But she's kind of doing this almost like a coping mechanism, but it seems like it is almost at a subconscious level for her. Aiden comes into her room, and he says, what is this? And he has the frame picture, and it's a picture of him and Mia. And on the bottom, it's got a little black ribbon. It says, in loving memory. And he's like, what. What does this mean? You know, what does. You know, what if we've. What if we've died? And she says, no, we haven't died, because I'm cold, I'm hungry, I'm talking to you. You know, da, da, da, da, da. I'm frustrated. And then Aiden says, well, maybe that's what it's like when you die. You still feel all these things. We. We wouldn't know if we died. And she's, you know, like, you know, don't be ridiculous. Blah, blah, blah. We cut to the dollhouse, and it shows a dollar sort of in, like, a stairway that's going up, but it's hanging. And then we cut to Grace in her room, takes the cross out of the dresser and puts it back up on the wall. So again, you know, we see her falling back maybe into her old ways. The stuff that was. Is bothering her before. She kind of is thinking, okay, well, I better get this stuff back up. We hear sort of a voiceover of her dad saying, repent and confess. And God wants you to confess, and you got to do this, you got to do that. And I think these are. We're getting a look sort of of what her thoughts are. And so, like, she's kind of hearing the voice of her dad and everything. So Grace goes back outside, and she's trying to get herself together. She comes back inside, and the kids are kind of kneeling on the Ground with their hands kind of clasping that prayer position in front of them, and they're praying, and they're saying, oh, you know, forgive us. And da, da, da, da, da. And there is a kind of like a bulletin or paper type thing on the floor. Grace picks it up, and it's an actual obituary with all three of their pictures on there saying that they died on December 22, and it was a defective gas heater and that the funeral service was held for them on January 9th. And so Grace is like, did you. You know, you did this? Did you do this? You know, did you make this? And Aiden just looks up and he says, you know, we must repent of our sins. And he keeps saying this stuff, you know, we got to repent. We got to confess. Then they're both. And she's. She's starting to yell at him, like, shut up. Shut up. Don't say that. You know, why did you do this? And they kind of keep going and escalating, and she starts screaming at him, and then he runs out of the room, and Mia kind of follows him, and he says, I'll prove it to you. I'll prove it to you. So Grace is kind of alone in the. In the front room, and we don't know really how long they've been gone, but it's a thing where she was at one position and now she's at a different position. She's kneeling in front of the fireplace, and she has that obituary paper, and she throws it into the fire. She then hears Mia start yelling for saying, grace, Grace, Grace. So Grace comes in. They go up into that stairwell, and she finds that Aiden has hung himself. And he's there, you know, with his eyes shut, looking down. And then all of a sudden, he opens his eyes, and he looks up to her, and he says, do you see now? Do you see? We can't die. He said, you're already dead. He goes, we're caught in purgatory. We must confess our sins and cleanse our souls in order to go to heaven. Aiden yells, you know, at her, confess. Repent your sins. Repent your sins. And then. So she's kind of all stunned, and she just doesn't know how to take it all in. And she kind of stumbles off out of the room. She. We. The scene we cut to next is she is in front of the. The Mary picture, and she's praying for protection and forgiveness. And she, you know, she's like, why is this happening? And she then picks up the picture, and she's like, why did you abandon me? And she throws, she throws the pick to the ground. The next scene we cut to is we see that there is a harness. It shows it back up in the attic, you know where that stairway was going up to. There's a harness on the floor of the attic. And then it kind of pans over and it shows a little, I guess you'd call it like a Bluetooth speaker, you know, about the size of. Oh, probably. I'm trying to think what would be commiserate to it. Like. Like it's almost the size of like a paperback book or something, but it's a speaker. And then you hear the voice of the father of Aaron, who is Grace's father coming. And I think we're supposed to think it's coming out of that Bluetooth speaker. So we cut to Grace. She's outside, kind of on the lake, maybe about 100 yards away from the house. And she's on her knees and she's shuffling in, probably like, you know, a six foot circle. She's just going round and round and she's kind of praying and doing, I guess, sort of like doing like a penance thing to sort of suffer for her sins. The kids are watching Grace and then eventually they're up by the window and they see Grace has kind of circled back and she's coming and she's carrying something. And as she gets closer they realize that it's the little dog, it's Grady and it's his frozen body. He's dead. And Mia starts like crying and they're just like, oh no. And then it's interesting because Aiden goes fuck. And you can tell he's like, ugh, like no, not like this wasn't supposed to happen type thing. We cut to that. Grace is sitting out on the front porch holding Grady. And all she is is she's just in like jeans and a sweater. And Mia is behind her and she's saying, oh, Grace, I'm so sorry. It was my fault. I left the door open and I'm sorry. I'm sorry. And she's crying and everything and she's like, please come back inside, it's too cold out here. Please come back inside. And I think Mia, I think it was a legitimate accident. I think maybe the. The door was kind of left ajar a little bit and Grady got out. But I don't think Mia would have ever done anything, nor do I think Aiden would have ever done anything to hurt the dog. So it wasn't like they did it on purpose. So that Grady could go outside. So again, Mia and Aiden are both out there asking Grace to come back inside, but she is. Is kind of in the throes of that psychotic break, and so she's just sitting there. We cut to the sea monkeys that are in the jar, and it looks like they're dead. So it probably got too cold in the house for him and it killed them. We cut to Aiden and Mia and they're in their room. And Aiden says, I don't know what to do. Mia goes, she's gonna freeze to death. Aiden then says, we have to convince her we. We gotta stop this. And it cuts to them. They're in, I guess the generator and stuff is maybe out. It's either in the basement somewhere or it's maybe kind of in a outbuilding. I think it's supposed to be probably in a basement or something like that. They move some stuff and there's kind of like a false panel where when they. They open up the false panel and what you see is. It's what's hidden in behind there is all their stuff. So their jackets, their food, all the Christmas decorations. Mia's in there and she's. And so this, this is kind of one of the big reveals. And this is the part where again, on a second viewing, you're like, oh, okay, they are doing all this stuff. It's not something that was supernatural. It's not something that was all just in Mia's head or not. Mia said all in Grace's head. It's not stuff that. That Grace was doing as part of a psychotic break where she's going around and taking stuff or doing things. This is the kids. This is Aiden and Mia basically messing with her. And this is part of it again, where you sort of need to suspend disbelief a little bit just because of the sophistication of how. How all this stuff went down and how. How everything would have had to kind of fall in place and, and. And, you know, so I don't know. It's. Again, when you sort of watch it for the first time. And I remember at the first time, one of the things I thought was, well, I don't think it's them because, you know, Grace is constantly like, are you doing this? Are you. Are you messing with me? Are you setting all this stuff up? And they're like, no. And one of the things I thought at first was, oh, maybe there are members of the cult that she didn't know about. Like there was a sub cult or something. And they've kind of found out where she is. And then they feel that, you know, she has gone back into a life of sin, and they want to. And so they're the ones that came in and they're doing all this stuff to, you know, to make her repent and bring her back to the Lord, so to speak. Because it seemed like, well, you know, all this stuff, it would be a little bit much for these kids to be able to pull off. But again, so when that first happened, I was like, what, are you kidding me? No way. And so what they do is they. They go back out to the porch where Grace is. They're trying to get her to come back inside. She's just sitting there. She's still holding on to Grady, and they're. They're going her, look, we were just pretending. Aiden's like, we didn't die. He's like, I didn't hang myself. None of this stuff was real. And then Grace just kind of mumbles, we're all sinners on earth. Maybe the Lord forgive us that we may enter the kingdom of heaven. And she's mumbling all this other stuff. Aiden and Mia try. They kind of leave her, and they try and go start the generator, but it won't start. We cut. We're back into their room again, Aiden and Mia's room, and Mia says, maybe we should give her another sleeping pill. Grace is, at this point, is back inside. She's probably been out there for. In pretty bad exposure for at least three hours or so. And they go down. The kids here come back in, and they go downstairs because their room is upstairs. They go downstairs, and they see that Mia has taken two partially burned logs that are still kind of have. Are covered with glowing embers. And then she is doing again, kind of like penance or suffering for her sins. And she kneels down on the logs, and it burns. Of course it burns her knees. And she kind of falls over and is screaming and gagging. And then, of course, they are horrified when they see this, and they beat feet back upstairs. And then we cut back to Grace, and she kneels back onto the. What do we call, smoldering embers, I guess, or onto the coals. And she is saying, like, I repent for the harm that I've caused this family, Meaning she sees her sins as. And so I guess this gives us a little bit more confirmation of what happened, how the breakup happened of Richard and Laura. And, you know, so she's like, oh, you know, I repent for fornication and all this other stuff. Then it cuts back up. We see Aiden and Mia are upstairs and Grace is continuing to basically torture herself. And she's just screaming and screaming. And of course this is just terrifying the kids. And they're trying to hide upstairs. They're on like an old mattress and they got like a sheet. They're trying to pull it over themselves. And then of course the problem is it's the same thing. So a lot of the stuff that Aiden said, it was true. They can't leave, they can't walk out. It's too far. Even with their coats and stuff, it's too cold and they just won't make it. We cut to and we see Richard is back at home and he's in Mia's room and he's looking into the dollhouse and he sees the little hanging doll because again, the dollhouse is a replica of the lodge. And he sees the little Aiden doll hanging up or something, or he sees a doll hanging up on, you know, in the ceiling. And then he looks down and he sees the other dolls that are all knocked over. He has this like kind of confused, concerned look on his face. And as he leaves, he's trying to call Grace and he's like, hey, I tried to call yesterday but I couldn't get through because I'm heading up now. It'll take me about, you know, five, six hours to get up there. And so I don't know again why he would necessarily. Maybe the hanging doll would kind of give him some concern. The other dolls just kind of knocked over. I don't think it would. But I wonder if he thinks like Aiden or maybe even Mia may be contemplating suicide because her mom killed themselves. And maybe they think, oh, I can, you know, we can go be with. Or they may, you know, try to, you know, try some other type of self harm type behaviors again because of what Laura did. And I think, I don't think it is supposed to be a, what do we want to say, a metaphor or representation. I think he's actually seeing the dolls. I think too that maybe some of the, you know, maybe this is one of the reasons why they were able to pull all this stuff off is because, remember the time from Thanksgiving until the time from Christmas time has been almost a month. And so maybe they were using the dolls to run through their plans and their setups and everything, you know, that I don't know. So we cut back to Mia and Aiden. They're holed up in the attic. They're basically just trying to keep their distance from Grace. Mia's like, man, I gotta go to the bathroom. Aiden's just like, go pee in the corner. We can't, we can't go down there. She just goes down. Anyway, she goes to the bathroom and then she comes back up. And then Grace follows them back. She goes back up. She knows where the kids are. She goes back up there. She's got the gun with her. She. Then, of course, they're cowering from her. She tells them they need to make a sacrifice, they need to repent for their sins, but God needs a sacrifice. She takes Mia's little doll, which again, to Mia is kind of like the representation of her mother. She sets it on fire. And then Aiden runs over and, you know, kind of throws a blanket on it and pats it out. And of course, this is super upsetting to Mia. We cut to Richard is pulling up outside. He comes inside and he looks and he sees that Grady is in his little dog bed, but obviously he's dead. He goes up, he's looking for everybody. So he starts to go upstairs. And then as he's coming up on this in the stairway, Grace is out. Of course, her face is all messed up, her legs are all messed up. She looks really, really bad. She's got the pistol in her hand. And she tells Richard, we're basically in purgatory. We're being punished for our sins. We're already dead. We have to go through, you know, the torture of purgatory to purge ourselves and then be able to go to heaven. And he's like, no, no, no. And then she takes the gun, puts it up to her head, and she pulls the trigger. And it either fell on an empty cylinder or, you know, something like that. And then she. So again, this is the, the gun that Richard had showed her before. So it's a single action pistol. It's like a cowboy gun, meaning that you can't pull the trigger unless you first cock the hammer back. So when she puts the gun up to her head and pulls the trigger, Richard is still kind of down below her, looking up at her. And she's got, she's holding the gun, but she's. She's kind of got it. If you can picture it, she's sort of got it. Like, imagine if you were holding the gun up by your head, but it's pointing up and kind of leaning off to the side at that point. I don't. I think what Richard could have done is rushed up the stairs, grabbed her again. He's familiar with the gun. It's not a double action Meaning you can't just pull the trigger and it's going to cock the hammer back and fire. You can't. So Grace would have to. He. And he's close to her. He's close enough to reach up and grab her, which he actually. But he's like, you know, you know, don't do this, don't do this. And then she cocks the hammer back and she's kind of pointing at him. He reaches up with both hands. And again it's easy to say, oh, he should have done this or he should have done that. But all he would have had to do is like, kind of put his hand up on the hammer and hold it with both hands. And then he could have pried it away from Grace. But he. What he's doing is he's trying to get her just to lower the gun. And you know, she's going on about, you know, we're already dead, we need to, you know, we need to repent more. And then she pulls the trigger. And of course the gun is pointed right at Richard and blammo. It shoots him right in the head. And of course he's dead. He falls down the stairs. The kids run past Grace. They're screaming and yelling, Aiden. And Grace is just standing up there, and Aiden is like, we gotta go, we gotta go. And he grabs her and he pulls her out. They go out to the car, they start it up and they get it moving. But what happens is as they're backing up, the car gets stuck in the. In the snow bank a little bit. And it's either the wheels are spinning or they're kind of high centered. Grace slowly walks out there, out to where they are. She basically, you know, makes them come back inside. So we cut to the next scene and it's inside the. The house. They're sitting at the dinner table and she's dragged Richard's body down to where he's sitting sort of, you know, at the. At the head of the table. The kids are across, which would be on his right. And then Mia is across or not Mia, Grace is across on the other side. And she has. Excuse me. She has the revolver that's sitting right next to her. She starts singing a hymn. And after a little bit like, Mia starts to kind of shakily. And same with Aiden. They kind of like sing, mumble the hymn along with it. And before that she is saying like, well, hopefully Richard, you know, will be able to repent of his sins and he'll be going up to heaven. Now. I don't know if she thinks maybe because he's dead, that he's like his body, the shell is there. Because at one point she says something when before she shot Richard, she said something like, I've already exited this shell. So maybe she thinks because he's kind of dead there, that he's gone, like, he's gone on to heaven. So they kind of sing with her. She gets up and she walks around. So as the camera shot is we're looking across the table at Mia and Aiden, she gets up, she comes around behind him. And when she comes into frame, you see that across her mouth, she has the duct tape with the word sin on it, which is what everybody in the cult did had when they committed suicide. She then puts the sin tape on Mia and on Aiden. And then the camera cuts to just the shot of the revolver. And you can see the. The front of the bullets that you could see from the front of the cylinder are there. And then it fades to black and it ends. So the question is, does she end up killing him? Does she kill everybody? Does she kill them and then kill herself thinking like, oh, this is. We're still in purgatory, that type of thing. And it's kind of left to the imagination. So one of the things I think that because what's happened is she's reverted back to when she was in the cult and when she was 12 years old, and she's in basically a full psychotic breakdown is that she does kill them. I don't think that they survive. I think. And I think she kills herself as well. But you guys may have a different opinion. So if you do, let me know. Send in some stuff and let me know what you think. Now let's kind of circle back a little bit and let's talk about a couple of things that even kind of going through here and having a spoiler thing as we're going through. I didn't want to spoil some stuff. And one of that thing is that when. When the kids are first packing up all their stuff to go, we actually see Aiden when he's packing his duffel bag. He's got all his clothes and all his other junk, but he's putting the straps that he later uses to hang himself, he's putting those in his bag. He has. It looks like it's maybe a book or a picture frame, but it turned out to be the picture frame of that shows them, like, in memory, in Loving Memory, where it's the picture of he and Mia. He also throws candles in there that we're seeing later that's supposed to be there for the shrine, for the. For the. To their mother and stuff like that. And so when you. When you go back for a Second View or if you haven't seen it and you're. You're still kind of listening to this part, when you're watching it, you'll be able to say, oh, okay, you know, I kind of see what's happening. And again, there is a little bit, like I talked about before, of you sort of need to kind of suspend disbelief a little bit. And one of those things you may have a question about is like, when Mia said, you know, should we give her another sleeping pill? Should we basically drug her again? And so for some of this stuff where Mia is having or not Mia, where Grace is having these really weird dreams and all this other stuff, I don't know if maybe they've been drugging her this whole time or if the only time that they do it is when Aiden, after they kind of have the fight about him not talking to her, and she, you know, throws out the thing like, oh, I'm good enough to what you're. You know, you can watch me shower, but you don't want to talk to me type thing. And when he brings out the hot chocolate as a quote, unquote, peace offering, and, you know, Grace gets that look. Oh, she's like, happy. And she's like, oh, you know, maybe things are finally turning around. Well, he made that stuff because they were going to drug her, and again, that's why they were able to get all that stuff out, because she's basically zonk. And you would say, well, where would they get sleeping pills? And it could be that they got them from her mother, from their mother at their mom's house or something like that. You know, I don't know. Or maybe Richard has some. Or, you know, who knows? It's not uncommon for people to have, you know, sleeping pill things like Ambien and stuff like that. So you. It's also kind of significant when. When Grace or when Mia, like, has her little pretend cough, and it's like, I'm cold. And he's like, oh, you want me to get the gas heater? So all that stuff is a setup. The other part about, you know, which I talked a little bit about earlier was I don't know how they know she's gonna come back and how he would have stuff sort of buried in the snow for her to find, like when she finds some of the flowers and some of this other stuff. Like the plastic flowers for me from the shrine or whatever, I, you know, I don't know, that seems a little kind of convenient to say the least. Also, the other things that when Grace was hearing her, hearing her dad's voice, I think that probably for the majority of the time that that was the kids playing her father's voice. Now the cult had had a bunch of videos of him doing sermons and talking about stuff. So. And because Richard had written a book and had all this research, they easily could have downloaded that stuff off of his computer and done all that other kind of jazz. And so they also know too, some of this stuff is like, well, how would they know how to get under her skin and do all this other stuff? And if they've had about a month, and especially Aiden, because he's supposed to be probably 15ish, again, he's probably sophisticated enough to look through there and figure all this stuff out. Again, the things of you would say, well, how would he know to do the harness, to do a fake hanging and all this other stuff? Again, you sort of have to kind of put that stuff apart. But you could say, oh, in this last month or so he's been able to research it. He knows that they're going to go up there and he knows maybe and I, you know, maybe they can get her to act up and freak out. And then when their dad comes back, she's like, well, you know, going kind of a little crazy. And then, you know, hopefully they can, you know, put some distance between their dad and Grace. I, you know, of course, I don't think their plan was ever anything that like I talked about before, like they never intended the dog to be hurt. They probably didn't really intend for, for Grace to be hurt. And that's why when we see, when Grace is saying like, I'm gonna go and walk to the town, you see that when they're watching her go out, they're like, don't go, don't go. And you hear Aiden is kind of like, you know, don't go, Grace. Because he knows it could turn out really bad for. And then if, let's say she went out there and died of exposure, well, he know, he would know good and well that it's his fault. He would probably also know that Mia is not going to be able to keep that a secret. He might be able to, but she won't be able to. There was also some stuff which I don't think again, Mia, her character is probably not sophisticated enough to fake some of the interactions that she had with Grace. So I think that there is a part of Mia that actually does like Grace probably could get along. But I think a lot of this stuff has been predicated or dreamt up or masterminded, for lack of a better term, by Aiden. And we talked a little bit before about how sometimes the adults were blinded by kind of what they wanted to have happen, so they didn't really see what was going on around them. And we can kind of see the same thing maybe with Aiden. We kind of see the same thing a little bit with Mia and how she just wants. Even though she knows it won't go back to the way it was, maybe if Grace is out of the picture, she'll at least have her dad to herself and they can, you know, kind of have a little bit of normalcy. So that is gonna be it. I know this show is a super duper long one and I apologize for not being able to put stuff out, hopefully. Well, if you are hearing this and it's come in through the feed, I was able to get this stuff fixed. So again, today, and this is actually, I think I started on the 20th. Today's actually the 21st. I'm hoping sometime this coming week to be able to get the podcast feed problem going to where that. When the podcast, the RSS feeds and all, however, all that junk works, basically when it's. It's time to. When. When you're. Whatever you're. Whether you're using Apple Podcasts or whether you're using Spotify or, you know, whatever it is that you're using or. Or, you know, cast catcher, whatever they're called, when it kind of sends that ping out to see if anything is new, it will hopefully be able to load this stuff up. So anyway, if you want to contact me, you can either send your own audio in or you can send an email in. And if you want, I can read it out for you or play that stuff on the air for you, no problem. And you can send that to the armed apemail.com. all right, my beautiful beautiful primates and my beautiful, beautiful fellow travelers, I will talk to you guys next time. Sa. Sam.