The movie opens with a girl named Anna, and her boyfriend, Matt, at a bonfire party.
As Matt starts getting a little too close, Anna opts to leave her boyfriend there and go back home.
On the way, Anna treads through the woods, wherein she encounters three plastic bags. Curious,
she approaches one, and to her horror, it contains a redheaded girl’s dead body.
Scared, she returns to a small cottage in front of her home to check on her sick mother,
who is not supposed to be left alone. The mother frantically rings the bell on her wrist,
as if she’s trying to say something to Anna. As Anna is curious why her sick mother is alone,
she goes to the house to check on her father, but finds the house completely empty.
She feels a sinister presence inside, and not long after, the house bursts into flames.
As it turns out, everything that just happened is a recurring nightmare that
Anna is currently telling her therapist about. Based on their conversation,
both of them truly believe that some parts of the nightmare actually happened to Anna in real life,
but the event’s too traumatic that her mind decided to forget. One thing is for sure though:
Anna lost her mother in a tragic fire 10 months ago.
After the therapy session, the therapist announces to her that he believes the memory
loss she’s experiencing is normal after such traumatic event, and that all in all,
Anna’s mental health is all better and she doesn’t have to be treated in a mental hospital anymore.
Hearing this, Anna is ecstatic, and embraces her father who soon comes to pick her up.
Right as Anna gets home, the first thing she looks for is her sister, Alex, who is out
swimming at the lake by their house. However, as she goes downstairs to join her sister,
she encounters Rachel, her dad’s new girlfriend. Rachel says she's made Anna's favorite dish,
but her presence seems to put Anna off, so Anna excuses herself and heads to the lake.
She stops by the cottage where her late mother used to be treated, and has a memory
flash when she peeks through the door gap.
She is then interrupted by her sister, Alex,
and the two start catching up, until Alex starts yelling at her for never returning the letters
she sent. This confuses Anna, because she never received any when she was at the mental hospital,
which leads Alex to one conclusion. Alex heads back to the house, and starts yelling at their
dad, accusing him of being afraid if Alex would tell Anna about his new girlfriend.
After Alex leaves the house, Anna heads to the attic, where her mother’s old things are stored.
She goes through a series of old family pictures, and stops at a strange one which
shows her dad’s new girlfriend wearing a nanny uniform, meaning she was her late
mother’s caretaker at some point, but Anna must have forgotten due to her memory loss.
That night, Anna is woken up from her sleep by the sound of a bell ringing, followed by her bedroom
door swinging open. Scared, she turns away from the door, only to see her dead mother crawling on
the floor, followed by reaching for her bed. The figure disappears when the door to her
room slams closed,
and not long after, her sister Alex enters the room. Alex drunkenly asks why Anna has their mom’s old
bell in the room, and asks Anna not to romanticize the bell, because it was Rachel who got it for
their mother. According to Alex, Rachel was having an affair with their dad the entire time, and
only got the bell so she could hear mother coming whenever she’s being inappropriate with their dad.
In the morning, Anna decides to put up an old chalkboard that the family used
to have in the kitchen when the mother was alive. When Rachel enters the room,
she tells Anna that when she first showed up at the house, she realized that Alex
and Anna were different, because Alex was always doing her bitchy teenager thing.
Anna then goes for a swim with Alex, until her sister leaves her alone when Anna’s boyfriend,
Matt, approaches her with his boat. Matt is a delivery boy who the family hires to deliver
groceries. He voices his condolences over what happened, and claims that she followed
Anna home that night and saw everything that went down. But before Matt could elaborate,
Rachel conveniently appears, causing Matt to look uncomfortable and starts heading home.
That night, Anna becomes uncomfortable at the sight of her father cuddling up with Rachel,
so she goes away and enters the study.
In there, she finds a broken glass ball, and has a faint memory of it falling and breaking,
followed by hearing the sounds of bell ringing coming from outside the house.
Anna follows the sound, down to the lakeside cottage, where she suddenly sees her mother
in the room that used to be her mother's. The mother crawls on the floor before getting up, and
screaming "murderer" while pointing to the house. Hearing Anna’s screams, Alex comes to the rescue.
Here Anna tells Alex what she saw, and believes that their mother’s ghost is trying to tell her
something. After seeing Rachel standing in front of the house, Anna now believes
that the fire that killed her mother wasn’t an accident, but was purposely ignited by Rachel.
The following day, Alex and Anna talk about the possibility that Rachel could be the murderer.
Just then, Rachel knocks on the bathroom door, and asks them to come shopping with
her for a dinner party. Alex bluntly says no, but Anna agrees to go into town with Rachel,
because she wants to see Matt and get the full story of what exactly he saw that night.
Anna and Rachel stop by a diner for lunch, during which Rachel showcases a pearl necklace
that a dead old patient gave to her a long time ago. As Rachel kept on talking about how
terrible her job as a caretaker had been before, Anna begins having another vision; this time,
she sees the red-headed girl from her nightmares sitting not far from her, before disappearing.
Afterwards, they head to the grocery store, and while Rachel shops,
Anna goes to find Matt who works there. But because Matt is busy right now,
they agree to meet tonight at the rock by the dock. Rachel is lurking behind,
and tells Matt to stop delivering groceries to their house from now on.
Once Anna gets home, she joins her sister, who is digging around Rachel’s things in the bathroom.
Interestingly, they find a case full of sedatives that Rachel undoubtedly used as a caretaker.
At night, the sisters head to the rock and wait for Matt, but he never shows up. Disappointed,
they head home and go to bed, during which Anna gets yet another nightmare.
She is woken up by Matt, who climbs through her window with his shirt soaked,
as he claims to have slipped and fallen on his way here. After he takes it off,
Anna notices something odd happening to his back, and eventually, his spine gets all twisted.
Anna quickly exits the room, and realizes that it’s daylight out.
When she reopens the bedroom door, Matt is gone, but there is a helicopter out in the lake.
The sisters rush to the scene, and discover Matt’s dead body getting pulled out of the water.
According to the sheriff, Matt must have slipped out of his boat and
broken his back on his way to meet Anna, but of course Anna doesn’t believe this.
After the sheriff leaves, she tries telling her father that what happened to Matt must
have something to do with Rachel, as she feels like Rachel doesn’t want Matt to be near her,
and was trying to keep Matt from revealing the truth to her. However, her father finds
this absurd, and tells her to let this go. Anna retreats to the bathroom, where she starts crying.
Not long after, Alex shows up, and Anna swears to her that Matt was in her room last
night, and said that Rachel tried to warn him. To prove this, Anna shows the grip marks in her arms.
The moment Alex starts to believe her, they begin to look into Rachel's background, and contact her
former employer. But they were surprised to find that no one with that name worked at that place.
Meanwhile, Rachel is busy setting up for a dinner party she’s hosting at the house tonight.
After discovering that Rachel’s ID is fake, Anna goes to confront Rachel about it,
and announces that she’s going to tell her father. However, Rachel has more tricks up her sleeve;
she and the father have already discussed with the doctor about Anna's real behavior,
and if Anna tells her father about her finding, the father will probably send her back to the
mental hospital. Hearing this deters Anna from trying to talk to her father, and she also advises
her sister from doing so because she thinks their father isn’t gonna believe any of them anyway.
During the dinner party, Anna goes to the kitchen to help Rachel take out the garbage,
but she stops when she hears a muffled voice coming out of it.
Driven by curiosity,
she opens the garbage bag, spilling a used can of tomato in the process.
As Anna goes to clean it, she checks out a noise under the fridge, right when the
redheaded girl from her nightmares emerges, warning her that she will be the next to die.
Anna just now realizes that she caused the roast beef on top of the table to fall,
and Rachel is livid that she's been counting on the roast beef
for the dinner party. Seeing this, the dad tells Anna to go to bed.
The father is forced to end the party, and later, Anna decides to finally confront her father.
She tries telling him that Rachel is a manipulative liar, who’s always wanted to destroy the family,
but the father won’t have it, and is already set on marrying Rachel soon.
On the next day, the father leaves on a business trip, leaving the sisters with Rachel.
That day, they go to attend Matt’s funeral, during which Anna yet again sees the redheaded girl,
and she decides to follow her. The little girl joins two little boys,
and they continue to walk further and further,
leading Anna to the three graves buried next to one another, that belong to Wright's siblings.
After they get home, Anna immediately tells her sister about this, and the two conduct
a Google search on the siblings’ names. As it turns out, they were murdered by their nanny,
Mildred Kemp, who was romantically obsessed with the children’s father after the death of their
mother in an accident. Hence, to get close to the father, the children were heavily sedated before
being repeatedly stabbed to death by the nanny. To their surprise, they also find a family picture
wherein the mother was wearing a pearl necklace around her neck, that looks eerily identical
to the one Rachel owns. With this discovery, the sisters now have concrete proof, and conclude that
Rachel is actually Mildred Kemp. Unfortunately, Rachel has heard them talk about their plan.
That night, the sisters sneak around to try and retrieve the pearl necklace,
but the room is locked. And so, Alex climbs through the window, while Anna waits and
takes the car keys just in case. However, not long after, she hears Alex grunt in pain,
and finds the room unlocked. She heads inside to retrieve the pearl necklace but it’s gone,
while Rachel suddenly appears at the door holding it, because she knows that’s what Anna’s after.
Knowing that her cover is blown, Rachel violently tries to inject her with sedatives,
but Anna fights back, and beats her in the head with a perfume bottle.
She then escapes into Alex’s room, where Alex lies weakly. As it turns out, Rachel has
successfully sedated Alex. Anna vows to return for her sister, but for now she has to escape.
She exits through the window and starts the car, while Rachel tries to catch up to her but fails.
At the police station, she tells the sheriff everything about Rachel,
and tells him that Alex is still in the house. The sheriff luckily believes her,
but tells her to stay put at the station while he goes and takes care of things.
Later on, Anna eventually falls asleep, but when she wakes up, she finds Rachel and the sheriff
subduing her and injecting her with a sedative, meaning that the sheriff believed Rachel over her.
Rachel carries her back to the house and starts undressing her, while Anna could barely move.
She tries reaching for the knife on the nightstand, but is too weak to do so. In the background,
she sees her sister slowly approaching, just before she slips unconscious.
When Anna wakes up afterwards, she is still on the bed.
On her way out, she finds a trail of blood on the floor, and follows it down
to a garbage bin outside the house. She is shocked to find Rachel's dead body inside,
and not far from her, Alex stands with a bloody knife, saying that she had to do it.
Here the sisters pledge to stand together,
right as their father arrives home, and is shocked to see the girls’ bloody clothes.
Anna begins defending Alex for killing Rachel, claiming that Rachel was
trying to kill both Alex and herself. Hearing this, the father is appalled,
and reminds her that her sister died 10 months ago in the fire alongside her mother.
The knife is also in Anna’s hand, revealing to us that it was Anna who killed Rachel,
and making us question how delusional Anna has always been this entire time.
Anna finally begins to remember what actually happened during the night of the fire;
she comes home from the bonfire party to find Rachel and her dad making love,
and is furious because of it. Up next, she proceeds to angrily take a lantern to the cottage,
and fills a bucket with gasoline, intending to burn the house down. Alex tries to ask her
what's going on, and we see Anna didn't fully close the faucet, while the lantern she brought
falls to the floor. Alex then enters the cottage to check on their mother, just as the gasoline and
lantern start a huge fire that burns down the entire cottage, killing the mother and Alex.
It is now revealed to us that Anna has been actively delirious this entire time; flashbacks
reveal that Anna had been hallucinating Alex since she left the institution. Much of the interactions
that happened in the movie were twisted around in her head. Anna was also the one responsible
for Matt's death; Matt actually showed up at their planned meeting, and revealed he saw what Anna had done.
Moreover, Anna finally remembers killing Rachel, who wasn't actually a murderer, but a
kind woman trying to make the family work, and the mean version of her was only Anna’s imagination.
Back to the present, Rachel’s dead body getting taken away, and Anna getting arrested,
while the dad somberly watches through the window. The father also reveals to the
sheriff that Rachel changed her last name three years ago to escape an abusive ex-boyfriend.
Anna ends up at the mental hospital again, and is seen removing Rachel’s
face out of the family picture. She then stares at the room across from hers,
who belongs to none other than Mildred Kemp, the actual nanny who murdered the three children.