Two dogs are fused together in the opening 5 mins. There’s distressed whimpering and it’s pretty unsettling imagery of the two animals.
It’s implied the dogs are either dead or fully fused later in the film when a young girl draws the dogs. She’s asked if the dogs are hers and she says not anymore.
I’m voting “no” because nothing is firm but it’s essentially just as bad as a yes when the dogs are shown fused.
Didn’t distract from the overall film for me but definitely wish there was a better warning.
Hard to describe without spoilers: There's backstory about a character whose mother sort of vanished from his life for awhile in childhood (after the death of the other parent). None of this happens in the present.
There are scenes where Millie is happily in the company of someone else, and then she sees Tim has followed her to where she is, and the music and framing make you and her feel a jolt of panic. It is not a stalker situation, but it is the same feeling of spotting someone who has followed you to where you are.
1) when she’s talking on zoom with her friend 2) when she’s talking with Jamie about his husband
Not on-screen: the protagonist tells a story about his dad not believing him about a bad smell coming from his bedroom and focuses on the trauma of not being believed. The dad ends up trashing his room to find the scent, and the protagonist experiences PTSD around this.
One spouse slaps the other, though not as an intentional act of violence (it's an attempt to wake a person who seems to be sleepwalking and behaving in a disturbing way)
DETAILED SPOILERS There is a sex scene in a bathroom, and it is not safe, sane, or consensual.
Because sexual assault is complicated and the triggers are different for everyone, I want to give a thorough, thematic breakdown of what literally happens here so you have clarity about whether it’ll be triggering for you. These are the key points to know:
• Tim (under supernatural influence) shows up at Millie’s school. He ignores her as she angrily confronts him and kisses her. In the moment, she kisses him back, and they have what appears to be enthusiastic sex in a bathroom stall. • While having sex in this public place, they are caught. Because of the supernatural element, his genitals become stuck inside hers. They try to pull apart and cannot, expressing pain and panic. When they hear another teacher coming to check on them, she covers his mouth to silence him and forcibly pulls them apart. We see closeups of their faces as they experience visible and audible distress. Blood is shown on her leg afterward. • After the incident, Millie is angry at Tim. She says that she did not feel like she had the ability to say no in the moment. She expresses blame toward him. He, still under supernatural influence and struggling with poor mental health, cannot fully take responsibility for his actions, and is more focused on trying to convince her of the supernatural threat. • Millie attempts to break up with him. She tells him she does not want him anymore and makes him sleep in a different room. However, when the supernatural plot picks up again, this entire sequence is brushed aside. Millie quickly forgets what happened and apologizes to Tim about ignoring him about the supernatural threat.
I really hope this helps. This scene would have been a dealbreaker for me when deciding whether to watch the movie, and I’m just trying to leave the kind of review I wish I had seen before my viewing.
🔔 SPOILER In order to fight off the ( ), Tim grabs his prescribed Valium and commands that he and the other person must eat all of them to stop the ( ). They gobble them up and eventually snort them to go faster.
Later, Millie is about to do an amputation, and she forcefully feeds the person whiskey “for the pain.”
These are grotesque but somewhat absurd and over-the-top scenes; these acts are played as horror-comedy, not as horror-drama, if that helps you determine whether this will be a safe movie experience for you. If you need to skip this, start skipping SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER FROM when Millie and Tim are being drawn towards each other in the upstairs, nighttime hallway TO when they are outside again.
You don’t actually see the injured genitals, but you see a shot of a man’s penis being painfully stretched and blood dripping down a woman’s leg. You also see the people in pain for an extended sequence while this is happening
This is a body horror movie. The director is a special effects guy, and the movie has a huge quantity of different practical effects to create body horror.
SPOILERS:
at the very end, when tim and millie are fusing together, you can see tim’s hands/arms under millie’s skin and you can very clearly see/hear certain bones (specifically her shoulder blades) dislocating and being moved around
SPOILER Debatable. The main characters choose an alternative way of being where their individual identities are erased, but they do not traditionally die.
Tim and Millie eat an entire bottle of Valium and chug whiskey. While this would typically be an OD, they are barely even affected by this, and it’s not grounded in reality at all.
The threat of cheating is very strong, though no cheating happens.
Millie and Tim both joke about how she should cheat on him. The tone is strange.
SPOILER FOR NOT-CHEATING BUT RELEVANT There is an older man who is very attentive to and interested in Millie as a person, and Tim is jealous. However, we later learn that the man is gay, so all the cheating concerns go out the window.
after the massage scene, millie says she’s going into town and makes tim stay at home. he takes a shower and goes into a trance, repeatedly falling into walls/bashing his head into them
there’s a few good jumps in this movie!! here’s what i remember:
SPOILERS ofc
after the party in the opening of the film, tim and millie are talking in bed and “millie” starts saying hurtful things to tim. she then says “can you ask them to leave” and “i can’t sleep with them watching us”. tim looks over to see the bodies of his dead parents (although their identities are not revealed yet) in another bed opposite theirs, slowly moving closer. when tim lifts up his blanket to try and hide, the face of his dead mother is under it.
when tim is fixing a light in the new house, a bunch of fused rats drop from the ceiling
in the first scene in the cave, tim goes into a trance and suddenly looks over to see millie breathing rapidly and staring at him. then there’s a loud noise and he wakes up
tim and millie are in bed together and millie keeps saying that tim is “laying on her hair”. she turns around to see that he has a bunch of her hair in his mouth and it’s accompanied by a loud flash of light and a sting.
when millie is at jamie’s house the first time she looks out the window and sees tim watching her
when tim is in the cave again, he suddenly sees faces in the walls, and a deformed creature that appears to be a fusion goes wrong jumps out at him. there is another minor scare when he shines his flashlight on the creature.
when millie is at jamie’s house the second time watching the wedding tape, jamie is in the corner of the room and appears suddenly
there are probably more but i watched through my fingers a lot so i definitely missed some! these are the major ones i can remember though
A man sees a woman with blood on her thigh in a bathroom and acts embarrassed as he warns her about her period. We have to watch her feel intense embarrassment. No 1 or 2 though.
Everytime any scary thing happens, there is audio gore; the director and writer did all the sfx, so this movie is honestly like 1/3 creative body horror effects, and the movie is less a story and more a vessel to showcase his ability to show body horror effects! If that’s the thing you don’t want to hear, skip this movie or watch it with the sound off.
Blood on a woman’s thigh is mistaken for her period, and it’s reacted to by her and another man with a lot of embarrassment. He tells her to clean up, and later, he tells her she doesn’t need to apologize for “women stuff.” To be clear, she does not menstruate.
One of the rules of the ( ) is that, when the protagonists are physically far away from each other, dissociation happens to Tim that invokes self-harm and abandoning serious obligations. These are paired with a retrograde amnesia where he cannot recall the things that happened, and he is very distressed and not believed. It will be upsetting if “that wasn’t me, please believe me” is a theme for you. Caveat to this is that, towards the end of the movie when ( ) is understood, Millie does apologize to Tim about not believing him about this.
SPOILER Tim has PTSD as a plot device more than a serious exploration of PTSD. It’s not what the story is about, but there is a very intense scene where he recounts the traumatic memory. You’ll know it’s happening when they begin talking about the rat smell, and it focuses on smell being a trigger.
Can someone elaborate as to whether this is self harm as in slitting wrists or something else? My husband is distressed by the visual of that, but can handle other forms of self-harm.
The supernatural elements start out as feeling metaphorical, but they become “get with the program, this is what reality is now, so how do we deal with it?” Dissociation heavy
The whole film feels very claustrophobic. Tim can’t drive and is stuck in a rural cabin in the woods while Millie goes to work, but it’s less of a visceral feeling and more of an ongoing conversation about feeling trapped.
Under jumpscares, another user left a wonderful, thorough list of the sounds to expect. However, it’s a very sudden and loud movie the whole time, so I’d either get a good pair of sound-muffling headphones or wait until it comes to streaming so you can keep the volume low. I’m not bothered by loud sounds, but I had my hands over my ears for half the movie because of the sudden loudness.
When the characters drink from the pool, the camera goes underwater to create an eerie “something’s not right about this water” feeling. While in the cave, the characters are partially submerged in water, though never completely - just enough to damage their phones.
The characters of the film find a subterranean cave that has pews and strange religious imagery on the walls. It’s revealed that there used to be a chapel where the cave is, but that the chapel collapsed into the cave. The chapel was run by some sort of “new age” religion. One character says it seemed very “cult-y.” There is a video that plays towards the end of the film that depicts a wedding ceremony in the chapel, and the wedding turns into a disturbing religious ceremony.
The overall theme of the movie is sex and whether or not the characters will be able to maintain their relationship, with their sex life being one of the biggest factors. Millie tries to initiate sex a lot, and Tim rejects her a lot. The supernatural element in the film makes him want to have sex with her, and there are two explicit sex scenes: one is a risky and emotionally confusing hookup in a school bathroom that ends with pain and bad feelings, and the other is a “happy” sex scene at the end where they make out with each other, undress, and fuse together. I’m struggling to find words to explain it, but in the way you can cartoonishly imagine a baby’s footprint kicking out of a pregnant woman’s stomach, you can see their arms wrapped around each other underneath their skin.
i don't know what the other comment is talking about honestly. (SPOILERS) the merging moreso has to do with codependency and being unable to be without the other so you just become one. there's nothing sexual about how they explain it or describe it and nobody is objectified in this way. it's moreso seen as "romantic" by who it happens to, not sexual.
No, but in a backstory, Tim’s mom wakes up to see her spouse dead and “snaps”, becoming not herself anymore mentally, and the fear of inheriting her mental health lingers over Tim. It’s coded moreso as a dissociative trauma reaction instead of as dementia or Alzheimer’s, but these specific themes of seeing a parent lose their identity due to a mental state might be upsetting.
Could be a sad ending on paper, but tonally and thematically, the movie treats this as a happy ending with resolved character arcs and happy Spice Girls music. Kind of Midsommar-like, where people will be debating “is this a happy ending?”
It’s implied the dogs are either dead or fully fused later in the film when a young girl draws the dogs. She’s asked if the dogs are hers and she says not anymore.
I’m voting “no” because nothing is firm but it’s essentially just as bad as a yes when the dogs are shown fused.
Didn’t distract from the overall film for me but definitely wish there was a better warning.