The film takes place in the immediate aftermath of World War II in 1945, somewhere in an isolated
manor on the Channel Islands, New Jersey.
A stern, anal retentive woman named Grace, awakens from a nightmare, and gets ready for
her day.
The morning starts with her welcoming three people who show up at her door.
But before the older woman tells her their purpose of visit, she takes them inside without
any second thought.
Grace treats them as her servants and orders them to introduce themselves.
The elders are Mrs. Mills, and Mr. Tuttle, and the young lady is called Lydia, but she
is mute.
As Grace recently sent out an advertisement looking for new servants, she immediately
assumes that the three are looking for work, so she begins showing them around.
During the tour, she mentions her relief because the previous servant vanished just the week
before, without any notice and didn’t even collect their wages.
However, as the workers enter the kitchen, she locks its door, and afterwards, she takes
them to the music room, locking the door again.
Here she reveals the key rules to this house: One, no door must be opened without the previous
one being closed first.
Two, Grace tells them to be quiet during their work because she highly prizes silence in
her house due to her migraines.
She also informs them that the house has no electricity, because during the war, the Germans
kept cutting it off so they learned to live without it.
Grace decides to introduce her children to them, but first she tells them to close all
the curtains.
And this is where the third rule came into play: her children, Anne and Nicholas, are
medically sensitive to sunlight; more light exposure gives their skin blisters in a matter
of minutes.
And so, the area must be dark whenever the children are about to enter it.
Afterwards, the servants get to work right away; Mrs. Mills makes the children breakfast,
during which Anne talks about how their mom has gone mad because their dad, Charles, left
for the war but never came back.
Grace overhears this and pulls Mrs. Mills aside to tell her to pay no mind to what her
children says.
To add, she also just realized that the letter she wrote to the newspaper about looking for new
servants was never picked up by the mailman, so she questions how Mrs. Mills heard about
the job vacancy.
The new servant quickly explains that she just happened to stop by looking for work,
because she used to work for the previous owners of the house.
Grace then warns about her children's strange and fantastical ideas, something she doesn't
believe because she prefers to stay grounded.
Later that day, the mother gets her children to do a bible study about how one should be
good throughout their life, otherwise you’d go to hell in the afterlife.
She then tells them to study separately so they can focus, and escorts Anne into another
room.
As the children study, she hangs around the living room, until she gets interrupted by
the sound of a child crying.
Panicked, she rushes to check on Nicholas, only to find that he's actually just chilling.
As the cries persists, she assumes it’s Anne, so she rushes to check on her, but she’s
also not crying.
However, unlike Nicholas, Anne goes on and says that she heard the cries too, as earlier
she met a crying boy called Victor, who just left the room.
According to her, he was crying because he doesn’t like the house and told them to
leave the house.
Anne also mentions about Victor’s father and the others who have been viewing the house.
Grace thinks the story is absurd saying how a person can get in and out if the door is
locked but then gets shocked to see the door right across from her is open.
Livid, she summons the servants and scolds them for this, but the servants swear they
weren’t even inside the house this entire time.
At night, while the children sleep, Anne wakes Nicholas, and he freaks out because the curtain is open.
but his sister tells him she didn’t do this, Victor did.
This scares Nicholas so he curls back up in his bed, while Anne closes the curtain again.
Afterwards, we can hear Anne arguing with a boy who tells them to get off his bed, scaring
Nicholas.
Anne then tells Victor to touch Nicholas’s cheek so he knows that Victor is real.
Hearing his scream, Grace instantly rushes to their room and finds terrified Nicholas,
who blames Anne.
She punishes Anne by making her stand and read in the hall, while scolding her to stop
scaring her brother, but Anne still insists she’s not making anything up.
Fed up with Anne’s ghost stories, she makes her read Bible until she asks Nicholas for
forgiveness.
Three days have passed, and Anne has not yet apologized, saying she cannot apologize for
something she has not done.
Meanwhile, Grace is downstairs trying to embroider in silence, when she hears a loud commotion
upstairs.
She yells for her other servant Lydia to be quiet, but as she looks out the window, she
realizes that both Lydia and Mrs. Mills are actually out in the yard.
Confused, she goes upstairs to investigate, while the daughter reveals that Victor and
his family are inside the Junk store upstairs.
She cautiously goes in there, and begins hearing whispers between what sounds like several
people.
Scared, she unveils the furniture in hopes of finding them, but doesn’t find anyone.
The door suddenly swings, so she rushes out to catch up with the intruders, but doesn’t
see them.
Anne claims that there are several intruders roaming about the house who are claiming the
house as theirs.
Later that day, the daughter shows Grace a drawing she made of all the people living
the house with them: a father, mother, a little boy, and a scary old woman who would ask Anne
to come with her.
Grace now believes that there are intruders roaming around, so she arms herself with a
rifle, and sends her three servants to open all the curtains and do a full search around
the house.
After their search comes up empty handed, Grace sits in the junk room alone, where she
discovers an old family picture, along with a series of postmortem pictures.
As Mrs. Mills used to work there in the past, she decides to ask her about these, and she
calmly explains that taking postmortem pictures was a common practice back in the day.
Grace however finds this morbid, and asks her to get rid of these pictures.
That night, Grace embraces the sleeping Anne, and apologizes for being so hard on her.
As it turns out, little Nicholas is still awake, and tries asking her when their daddy
is coming home.
This triggers Grace’s grief for her husband Charles’s likely demise, and she spends
the rest of the night crying.
But all of the sudden, she hears the sound of the piano playing downstairs.
She arms herself and investigates,
but the sound stops just as she enters the room.
Paranoid, she locks the piano and exits,
but unexpectedly the door slams in her face, locking
her out of the piano room.
This prompts her to freak out and call for Mrs. Mills.
However, when she opens the door, Grace gets shocked to find the piano lid open again.
Mills tries to calm her down afterward, and says that sometimes the world of the dead
gets mixed up with the world of the living, which Grace can barely tolerate.
Now starting to grapple with the fact that there may be ghosts in the house, she heads
out in attempt to find the local priest.
Mills tries to stop her but Grace refuses to listen.
And on her way, she assigns the gardener, Mr. Tuttle, to look for gravestones around
the property.
However, after she sets off,
Tuttle asks if it is safe to let her go, to which Mills says
the fog will not let her go far.
What’s even more suspicious, Mills then tells Tuttle to cover up the gravestone completely.
Meanwhile, the fog in the woods gets thicker and thicker to the extent that it does not
let Grace pass.
And then in the middle of it all, a figure emerges from the fog, shocking Grace, as the
man is her long-lost husband, Charles.
They lovingly embrace each other, making Grace forgot her mission to find the priest.
She then brings her husband home, shocking Mills.
The first thing Charles does is walk up to his children, and hold them in his arms, but
afterwards, he retreats to the bedroom and simply lies there all day, palpably unwell.
While Grace shares a meal with her children later, it appears she doesn’t want to acknowledge
the ghosts’ existence anymore, and yet again scolds Anne for believing in them.
This upsets the little girl, who runs out of the room crying, until Mrs. Mills stops
her and assures her that she has seen the intruders Anne has been talking about, and
not only that, some big changes are coming soon.
At this point, Grace starts to believe that all the intruders have reverted back from
their house, which worries Mills and others.
They think that out of everyone, Grace would be the hardest to convince, which makes it
difficult for them to carry out their plan.
On the next day, Grace makes Anne wear the veil she has been sewing recently.
Anne loves it so much that she’d like to keep wearing it.
Afterwards, Grace leaves her alone to tend to her husband, who is still in bed looking
lifeless.
When she returns to check on Anne, she finds her playing on the ground, but to her surprise,
her hands and face have turned old.
This causes her to get violent, and thrashes that old bitch.
But as she removes the veil, it turns out she’s been rough handling Anne all along.
Mills arrives and immediately takes Anne away.
Later, Mills gives Grace the migraine pills she always takes, and tells her to leave the
responsibilities to her.
However, Grace becomes doubtful about Mills, so when Mills leaves, she does not take the
pills and instead throws them into the sink.
When she returns to the bedroom, Charles confronts her, saying that he found out about an incident
wherein Grace went violent with her children while he was away.
Charles expresses his disappointment in Grace, while she swears that she loves her children
and would never be violent towards them.
However, Charles gets up right after, and announces he’s only come home to say goodbye,
and must return to the front lines.
This infuriates Grace, as she understandably wishes for her husband to stay with her instead.
He comes up to her and kisses her to calm her down, but disappears that next morning.
Grieving, Grace goes out to the front gate in hopes of catching up with him, but of course
he’s not there.
At the same time, the children awake in the daylight, and when they realize, Anne screams
loudly.
Hearing her voice, Grace rushes to save them and finds that all of the curtains are missing.
Panicked, she shields her children with a coat, while taking them to the only dark room
left in the house.
She proceeds to question the servants, but they seem oddly calm about this, and suggests
that perhaps the children may have grown out of their photosensitivity.
Grace is now beyond livid; she decides to take a gun, right when Mills and others suddenly
arrive, making Grace more frightened.
She points the gun at the three servants to stop whatever plans they may have.
Grace then takes the keys to the rooms from them, and fires the three servants when they
try to calm her down.
As the three walk out, Mrs. Mills tells the two that it is now time to uncover the gravestones.
Meanwhile, Grace spends the day tearing the house apart looking for the curtains, but
she can’t seem to find them.
At nighttime, Anne yet again tries telling Nicholas that their mom has gone mad and violent
again like she did on that fateful day, but Nicholas still refuses to believe it.
Bored, she decides to jump out of the window, saying that she wants to look for their father.
Nicholas also comes with her, because he’s scared of being left alone.
Together, the two children tread through the dark, until they stumble upon three gravestones.
At the same time, Grace is still on the search for the curtains, and finally digs through
the servant’s quarter.
Finally, now comes the shocking truth: to Grace’s horror, she finds a postmortem picture
of Mrs. Mills, Mr. Tuttle, and Lydia.
At the same time, the daughter discovers that the gravestones belong to the three servants,
revealing that they’re ghosts all along.
Just in time, the servants appear, and start walking up toward Anne and Nicholas.
Scared, the siblings run for their lives, and finally meet with Grace.
The mother tells them to rush inside the house, while trying to shoot them to no avail.
Mills tells Grace that the three were killed by Tuberculosis more than half a century ago.
Hearing this, Grace retreats inside the house and locks the door, while the three come up
to the house.
She tells the dead people to go away, before telling the children to go upstairs and hide.
Mrs. Mills tells her the new situation about the house that they must learn to live with
each other, the living and the dead people.
But Grace refuses to listen and tells them if they are dead, then leave them to live
in peace.
To this, the servants tell her even if they leave, there are still the intruders living
in the house.
Tuttle informs her that the intruders also took the curtains down.
Meanwhile, the children are now hiding inside the wardrobe, when all of the sudden,
an old lady opens it, causing the children to scream.
Mrs. Mills tells Grace that the intruders have found the children, and now she has to
talk to them upstairs.
Although scared, Grace heads upstairs to check on Anne and Nicholas, and it is at this point
where she finds all intruders and her children.
The old lady asks Anne what happened here before, but Nicholas warns Anne not to tell
her.
We can see that the blind old woman is somewhat writing on the paper, while two men appear
to analyze their interaction, and a husband and wife watch.
The old woman asks Anne again what her mother did to them, right when Anne tells her something
about the pillow.
The children and Grace are shocked to hear this, while the old woman asks why they remain
in this house if they’re dead, which causes them to freak out and insist they're not dead.
Grace loses her cool and begins creating commotion in order to convince them, at which point
the perspective is flipped to reveal the table group is performing a séance, proving to
us who the real ghost is.
The people around the table, who consist of paranormal mediums, and the actual owners
of the house begin to discuss about what just happened.
The wife argues that she’s had enough of this haunting and they should move out of
this house, and starts bringing up the history of the previous owners;
apparently, the previous owner went mad, then strangled and shot her own children in the
past.
The wife also says that their son Victor has been getting nightmares and seen sightings
of a little girl around the house.
Hearing this gets the husband to relent, and promises they should move out first thing
in the morning.
Just outside the room, Grace now realizes that she has been dead this whole time; she
now remembers how she killed her children before killing herself out of guilt.
Grace eventually accepts that she is a ghost, and finally, Mrs. Mills walks in, welcoming
and informing her that for now the intruders are leaving.
But in the future others will come, and they must learn to coexist harmoniously.
Now that they’ve all accept that they’re ghosts, for the first time, the children step
out under the sun, and learn that it doesn’t hurt them anymore.
The film ends with Grace and her children watching as the intruders pack their bags,
and putting the property for sale.