Have you ever woken up from a nightmare in the middle of the night, seen a silhouette of something you couldn’t recognize and immediately came to the conclusion that the monster from your dreams has followed you in the real world?
Then you turn on the lights and it is just a coat or a backpack you dumped on a chair, and you berate yourself for keeping a messy room.
As a kid, that unidentifiable shape is frightening. As adults, maybe we will be quicker to recognize the objects in our room eventually.
As a kid, Nell wakes up several times at night, after her move to Hill House, to see a bent-neck lady standing at the foot of her bed, or even hovering over her. When she tells her parents of what she saw, they too assume she has an active imagination and is seeing something else in her room as a ghost.
The bent-neck lady follows her into adulthood, and Nell faces the additional issues of sleep paralysis. She meets with a sleep technologist, Arthur, and mistakenly assumes he’s asking her out. He tells her she hasn’t made a mistake. They date, he gets introduced to the family, and she marries him.
Every time Nell wakes up at night with sleep paralysis, Arthur helps her out, soothing her and being there for her.
However, on their honeymoon, when Nell experiences sleep paralysis, Arthur gets up and suddenly collapses. He has suffered an aneurysm and dies immediately. Nell lays stricken with dread because she’s also seeing the bent-neck lady and her husband die at the same time.
Nell starts using her medication less and less and picks up arguments with her siblings. She even attends Steve’s meet the author event and accuses him of lying on the book of what he experienced in Hill House.
She pushes everyone away and then when she feels Luke is in trouble and falls everyone, they barely take her call.
All alone, and traumatized by what she experienced on her honeymoon, she goes to a therapist who reminds her that everything, ever problem she is experiencing is founded from her stay in Hill House which is now just a carcass.
Nell wants to believe that too and goes to Hill House, lying to her father Hugh on the phone that she will go with him to the house tomorrow to get closure.
She enters the house and remembers seeing a tear in the wallpaper that read Come Home Nell.
Now it’s her Mother standing by the wall writing Welcome Home Nell. The whole house is beautifully renovated and her whole family is there, not mad at her anymore.
In reality, Nell is roaming around the abandoned house in a trance. In her illusion, she sees Arthur and dances with him just like she did on her wedding day.
Then she reaches the top floor of the spiral staircase that leads to the red door that never opens. She finds her mother there who gifts her a locket.
Nell immediately snaps back to reality and finds a noose around her neck. She asks her mother for help, but her mother has turned sinister. She is pushed down and Nell finds herself falling through past events.
To her horror, she discovers she was the bent-neck lady all along. She keeps seeing her former kid self being terrified of her and can’t scream.
Eventually, the life goes out of her and Nell dies...
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