At the beginning of the movie, we are introduced to a newlywed couple;
Julia, an American who just moved to Bucharest with her Romanian husband, Francis.
They are moving into Romania because the company Francis works at recently mandated
him to transfer to the country. Julia, being an American,
has no idea what her husband is talking about with the Romanian taxi driver.
The taxi then drops them off at their new apartment, and from the get go,
we already see a strange person staring at Julia from a window, but she remains unfazed for now.
The couple are immediately welcomed by the apartment owner and led to their room. We can
see that the apartment has a large picture window, and they can see the apartment across the street.
After they settle in for the night, Julia is unable to sleep, so she goes to the window to unwind.
And yet again, she finds that someone is watching her from the opposite building,
but she ignores it, and tries to get some more sleep.
On the next morning, she wakes up alone to a message from her husband,
saying that he couldn’t bear to wake her up. After seeing the message,
Julia goes about her day by performing house chores, until she gets interrupted
by the sound of her neighbour dancing and shouting from the apartment next door.
Later on, she decides to learn Romanian and explore the city,
activities of which she continues to do for days to come. Sadly, as she doesn’t
understand the language, life in the country eventually becomes lonely and tedious for her.
One day, she finds herself staring out the window again, and to her surprise, discovers the same
guy as last time watching her from the building across from her. However, she doesn’t tell Francis
about it when he comes home that night, and they proceed to have a pleasant evening out together.
On their walk home, they suddenly stumble upon an ambulance and several police officers standing
around what looks like a crime scene, with a man curling up inside an ambulance.
Francis asks what happened to one of the ladies, but she has no idea and it seems like something really bad has happened.
Later on, after watching the news on TV, they discover that a woman’s dead body was found in a house near their
apartment, which explains the crime scene they saw that night. Plus, the guy in the ambulance
was the one who found the body. The notion that there might be a killer in the area rattles Julia,
and prompts her to finally tell Francis about the guy who has been watching her from across
the building. Francis, however, simply brushes it off, mentioning that she is getting paranoid,
and asks her to prepare dinner for tonight because his colleagues are coming over.
During dinner, at one point Francis’ colleague, Simon,
begins talking about the recent dead body discovery on the news,
and that there’s a rumour going around that the victim’s head was found decapitated.
He follows his argument by theorizing that this murder may be tied to another
body that was discovered last month, wherein a woman was discovered with her throat slit.
In short, Simon is convinced that there is a serial killer roaming around,
whom the police have nicknamed “The Spider.” Julia then goes outside to throw away the garbage,
and stumbles upon her next-door neighbor, whose name is Irina. The neighbor apologizes for being
so loud the other day, and informs her to simply give her a heads up whenever she’s being too loud.
The following day, Julia comes across a newspaper featuring the name
of the most recent murder victim, and decides to look up articles about it in English.
Through this research, she discovers that there is indeed a serial killer roaming about Bucharest,
and even watches an interview video of one of the survivors who reveals that she was being followed
for several days, and the killer entered her house, pressed a pillow over her face,
and slit her throat with a knife. Allegedly, the murderer creepily sat next to the woman for hours,
watching her bleed and succumb. Understandably, hearing all of this only spooks
Julia, and when she's walking through the city, she starts to feel like someone is following her.
To refresh her mind, she decides to watch an English movie in a theatre.
After a while, a guy enters the theatre, and decides to sit just behind her,
despite there being plenty of other seats around. She turns to look at him but she isn't able
to see his face because she is frightened. To make things worse, the man leans towards her,
so she decides to vacate the premises immediately.
The place she visits next is the grocery store, where she soon comes
to face with a suspicious man once more.
Scared, she accidentally knocks over a
pickle jar on her way to the supply room, and briefly sees the guy watching where she goes.
Luckily, an angry employee walks up to her, and Julia quickly leaves through
the back door. We see how fear has taken over her entire being,
to the point the she has trouble going about her day normally.
This motivates her to tell Francis about the supermarket encounter, and together the husband
and wife decide to revisit the grocery store, and ask to see the CCTV footage from that day.
While watching the footage, Julia takes a picture of the creepy guy. However, Francis is
not convinced that Julia was being followed, and considers it to be a misunderstanding. Instead,
he says that the man had been staring at her since she was doing the same to him.
From that point on, it is obvious that her anxiety has spiked, and Julia spends the
entire day in her apartment, out of fear that she will run into the mysterious man again.
That night, she is startled by a series of loud banging on her door,
which expectedly terrifies her.
She slowly opens the door, only to discover that it is an old Romanian lady asking for
her help about something, which she fails to understand because she doesn’t speak the language.
It isn’t until Irina the neighbor steps in to translate that Julia finally learns that
the old lady’s cat is missing, and she’s asking for help to find it. Once Irina convinces the
lady to go elsewhere, she invites Julia into her apartment for drinks. While the two women
get engrossed in a pleasant chat, they suddenly get interrupted by Irina’s fiery ex-boyfriend,
who is banging on the door and shouting in Romanian. Irina deals with him before
returning to Julia's side, and showing her that there’s nothing to worry about. To emphasize
on this fact, she shows a handgun that her ex-boyfriend gifted her to protect herself.
When Julia returns to her apartment later, she decides to confront the
man and conclude if he was actually looking at her, or if she is just getting paranoid.
She then finds the mysterious man is standing in the window as usual,
and this time decides to wave at him. Like a creep, he waves back,
which only scares her. She reports this to Francis when he arrives home, and asks him to summon a
police officer. Julia is sure that the man is the same one who followed her the other day.
The policeman and Francis who are not quite convinced with Julia's complaint, agree to look
into this by going to the apartment building next door, and pay the guy a visit. However,
Francis returns empty-handed, as the police insists that the guy hasn’t broken any laws,
and therefore, there is nothing they can do about it. The husband also tells Julia that
even if he is the same person, it's not crazy to think that he'd be shopping at the same shop,
and Julia is being unreasonably paranoid. Seeing how lax Francis is acting infuriates Julia, and
the couple end up in argument, with Julia feeling anxious, alone and unsafe in this foreign country.
On the next day, Julia stumbles upon the creepy guy in town, and decides to follow him,
which leads her straight to an underground strip club, where the guy apparently works as a cleaner.
To her surprise, she also discovers that Irina works there as one of the performers,
and takes a little bit of time to explain what’s going on. Irina informs her that the
cleaners change daily, and that she’s never seen the guy before. Before leaving to work,
she also promises to look after Julia. That night, when Julia is about to go to sleep,
the strange man ambushing her in her own home.
Fortunately, it's just a nightmare. She ends up getting woken up
by a scream coming from Irina’s apartment.
Convinced that her friend is in trouble,
Julia panics and asks for help from the landlady to open the door.
But once they get in, they find the apartment empty save for a cat, which the
old lady immediately carries away. Everyone believes it was the cat who made the noise.
After that incident, we see the landlady complaining to Francis about Julia’s erratic
behavior. She warns them by saying that she doesn't want troublesome tenants in her building.
Francis then decides to sit his wife down and apologize to her for not being around enough,
and thus causing her to get this paranoid and lowkey delusional. Julia then makes a
call to Irina’s workplace, but even they have no clue where the woman might have gone off to.
Later that day, Julia finds a guy knocking on Irina’s door, who turns out to be none other
than her ex-boyfriend. She catches him up on Irina’s mysterious disappearance,
then asks for Irina's phone number, and tries to call her cell right away.
Surprisingly, they start hearing Irina’s phone ring inside the apartment,
even though obviously there is no one there. Growing even more worried, Julia convinces
the ex-boyfriend to accompany her to the apartment across the street,
so that she can confront the mysterious man, since she saw him working at the same club as Irina.
Upon their arrival, Irina’s fiery boyfriend starts banging and yelling at the locked door,
threatening whoever’s in there to stay away from Julia. No one replies, and since the boyfriend is
in a hurry, he excuses himself, and tells Julia to inform him if she hears anything from Irena.
Once he leaves, Julia walks up to the door herself, and gets the tenant to open up,
only to discover that it is only an old man who is terrified by all the threats
that the ex-boyfriend had just dished out. Julia immediately apologizes and leaves. As Julia
is about to head downstairs, she comes face to face with the creepy guy who as it turns out
does live in this building. She immediately takes the elevator and exits the building.
Later that night, the couple find the same police officer they summoned before
standing at their door, this time bringing the guy from the grocery store by his side.
We learn that the guy’s name is Mr. Webber, and apparently, the guy feels that Julia and
Francis have been stalking him and harassing his father, and therefore would like to press
charges. The police officer announces that he is here to mitigate the conflict between them,
and by the end of the encounter even gets them to shake hands as a peaceful gesture.
After the visit from Mr. Webber, Francis walks up to Julia, bearing the good news that
the serial killer has finally been arrested. Upon seeing the mugshot in the news article,
Julia recognizes him as the man she saw inside the ambulance that night. According to the news,
he fits the profile as he has a criminal record and used to work for the victim.
With the crime solved, Francis hopes that Julia would stop feeling so anxious and suspicious
about Mr. Webber. Wanting to move on with their lives, Francis takes her to his office party.
At some point, Simon ends up offending Julia, and makes an insensitive joke about how Julia
hasn’t been bored in their apartment, because she keeps busy with a ‘spider,’ a.k.a the serial
killer’s nickname. Julia somehow understands that the group is making fun of her in Romanian.
As a result, she stomps away from the premises despite Francis’ effort to run after her.
It’s at this point that the husband says he is sick of her paranoia and fear fantasies,
and that he can no longer stand them. Julia ends up taking the train home,
and is surprised to see Mr. Webber sitting in the distance.
But all of the sudden, the train
comes to an abrupt halt, and Mr. Webber sits opposite her, which understandably scares her.
He then casually reveals why he stares at her all night. Mr. Webber says that his life has
become boring, due to his daily routine of caring for his sick father and working as a cleaner.
As a result, he stares at people as it gives him happiness. For years, no one noticed him,
but then a beautiful girl like Julia noticed and waved at him. This made
him happy so now he wants to be friends with her. While he is talking, Julia notices ominous looking
plastic bag with him. She immediately apologizes before leaving the train, and returning straight
home. As she has had enough of Francis doubting her stories and being absent from her life,
she begins to pack her things, only pausing once she hears the sound of music at Irina's apartment.
She goes next door and finds Irina’s door unlocked,
but to her horror, she immediately discovers Irina’s decapitated body inside,
before she suddenly gets ambushed from behind.
The next time she wakes up, she sees Webber,
confirming Julia’s suspicion after all. Webber explains how he killed Irina and
hid her body in her closet, when Julia and the landlady came from searching for Irina a few
days back.
The two are then interrupted by a series of
sounds coming from next door, marking Francis’ return home. Hearing this,
Julia tries to scream for help, but Webber slits her throat to stop her.
While bleeding out, she crawls across the floor in attempt to reach for Irina’s gun,
but she passes out before she gets to it. As she lies there lifeless,
Webber lays next to her until she stops breathing. Meanwhile back in the other apartment,
Francis attempts to call Julia, and
ends up hearing Julia’s phone ring next door. At the same time, it is revealed that a little
girl has been watching what Webber has done from the apartment building across from them,
prompting Webber to begin heading outside to possibly murder the little girl as well.
However, as Webber exits to the hall, he comes face to face with Francis,
who is more than surprised to find him there. And then this happens:
A series of bullets knock him dead,
shot by none other than Julia who as it turns out only faked fainted earlier.
The film ends with a shocked Francis coming face-to-face with his bloody wife,
now finally ready to admit that she has been right all along.