(2018)

Submitted by Amy W

The Little Stranger
Based on the novel by Sarah Waters
(2018)

As a young boy, Dr. Sidney Faraday (Domnhall Gleeson) first glimpsed Hundreds Hall, a magnificent brick mansion in a small village in England. His mother worked there as a maid, and once inside, the house cast its spell upon him. Faraday was both thrilled to be inside Hundreds Hall at last, and furious at his lower-class upbringing, which would never allow him to own it. Enraged, he snaps off a plaster acorn on one of the mirrors.

Years later, after having become a doctor and partner at his local practice, Faraday returns to the fateful estate. One of its young servant girls has fallen ill. He meets the lovely but hardened Caroline Ayres (Ruth Wilson), her mother (Charlotte Rampling) and wounded WWI veteran brother Roderick (Will Poulter), suffering from disfigurement and PTSD.

After treating Roderick’s horribly-scarred and disabled leg to relieve his pain, Faraday ingratiates himself further and further into the Ayres’ lives. Roderick suspects there is “something in the house that hates him” and wants him gone. Unbeknownst to Roderick, that presence is Dr. Faraday. One by one, he gets rid of the Ayres clan via his poltergeist, a psychic manifestation of his childhood desire to have Hundreds Hall at any cost.

Faraday does away with them in the following order:

At the end of the movie, Faraday has achieved his goal, but he now resides in an empty mausoleum of a house, with no one for company. The scene shows him as a child with the house keys, then back as an adult.