A Creature Was Stirring (2023)-- My take on the movie with spoilers

 Plot: It’s Christmas time and Faith is taking care of her daughter Charm who suffers from a mysterious affliction. When two strangers break into their home, chaos ensues. 

It was the night before Christmas, and not a creature was stirring…

Except in this movie a creature was definitely stirring and causing a lot of problems. 

A CREATURE WAS STIRRING has a twist in the end that you probably won’t see coming because of the way it was executed and not because it was surprising that you didn’t notice the hints before. 

There is a lot of things that needed an explanation but the movie abruptly ends with the twist that will make you feel that yes, this was good but also how did any of the events take place in the movie and why?

A Creature Was Stirring has a strong message about addiction and the impact it can have on your mental health. It focuses on the actions of people when they abuse drugs and how the repercussions of it can hamper their lives. 

There are strong performances all around and you may notice the lighting is putting off at first but it makes sense considering the twist in the end. Was it all part of a psychedelic episode? 

Anyway, here is what happened in A Creature Was Stirring 

A CREATURE WAS STIRRING Plot

The movie opens with Faith standing at the door watching the blizzard. There is a suitcase in her hand. Behind her, Charm calls out and tells her that the decorations have fallen off. Faith puts down her suitcase and closes the door. 

Faith feeds her daughter burnt toast and tells a joke that is in poor taste but establishes that she works as a nurse. There’s a stethoscope around her neck so there we go, she’s a nurse. 

Faith notices that her daughter is agitated and asks her to take her temperature. Charm is not into it but complies anyway. When she realizes that Charm’s temperature is up, she forces her to take ice water baths and stay in her room. 

There is some conversation between the two where Faith reveals that she has done things she isn’t proud of.  Before that there was also talk about a comic and a hint about things people can do with their minds. So, a couple of hints at what the twist is going to be, is already given in these few scenes. 

Next up, it is time for the intruders to break into the house. It is brother and sister duo, Liz and Kory who creep into the house. But Faith isn’t only a nurse who worries about her daughter’s temperature. She knows how to wield a bat with screws on them. She goes to the garage and we find a dark figure with spikes all over its body, standing up but Faith is hardly bothered by it. 

The second she notices the door and windows are open, she creeps up on Kory and hits him with the bat. Liz quickly defends her brother and pretty much forces Faith to take care of him. 

Since Faith is a nurse, she helps Kory unaware that upstairs, Charm’s temperature has really gone up. Faith goes to check up on her and is attacked. During the opening credits we have seen that 102 degrees to 104 degrees is considered safe so Faith waits with an injection as the reading goes up. When the temperature goes down, she is relieved but Charm suddenly heats up and attacks her mother under the blanket. 

Liz and Kory wonder what is going up there as Faith manages to inject her daughter and safely creep out of the blanket. She then puts up Liz and Kory for the night. 

Liz keeps playing with her cross and mentions that it makes her feel safe. Faith tells her that big bats with screws makes her feel safe instead. She also reveals that she had a hospice patient that left her this house in the will. No relevance to the story. This is added just to explain how a nurse with a prior drug problem could have such a big house. 

Kory and Liz have a discussion about how they were lucky enough to have stumbled onto this house during a snowstorm and found shelter. Kory isn’t as religious as Liz who has a religious tattoo on her back. 

Faith examines Charm for brain damage, a side effect from having a prolonged fever. Charm is more interested in knowing what kinds of mistakes he mother had made in the past and if she was one of them. Faith assures her she was not and mentions the guests. Charm wants to meet them and is allowed to do so only if she takes some pills. 

The door is left open, and so a very curious Kory hobbles upstairs and then hides in a closet to talk to Charm who is a budding artist. She tells Kory about her mother’s drug problems and how as a kid she was attacked by this prickly creature. Faith was arrested on the spot but allegedly went through a rehab program and is now better. While Kory remarks on how she has a cool origin story, Charm shows him her battle scars which is a lot of pricking scars on her chest. 

That shuts Kory right up and he escapes the closet while Charm’s back is turned. 

During dinner, Liz and Faith get into an argument about faith and God’s plan. Considering her name is Faith, she really doesn’t have a lot of faith to begin with. Charm gets annoyed and tells her one of the stories from Green Lantern. She ends up getting a seizure afterwards and just as the three are tending to her, the lights go off. 

Liz is left to watch Charm have a seizure while Kory and Faith go to check the fuse box. Kory takes this time to hit on Faith. 

Liz gets worried when Charm suddenly disappears, and a prickly monster comes down the fireplace. She finds a tunnel outside the front door and grabs a candy cane light to find out where the voices are coming from. This is just so nobody should forget that it is a Christmas-themed horror movie. 

She enters the tunnels, finds a large porcupine needle and then a monster. By this time Faith and Kory have restored the lights and drag Liz out. They also find Charm, weak, in the tunnels. 

Liz and Kory have a private discussion where Liz is certain that Faith is not to be trusted and that their food was tainted which gave them hallucinations. She also thinks that Charm may be a captive. 

Later Liz sees weird lights under the door while Kory sets about touching everything that doesn’t belong to him and steals stuff. When he goes into the kitchen to get some water, he encounters the prickly monster who isn’t too happy with him taking Faith’s photo. 

Meanwhile, Liz finds Charm’s art book in which she has drawn herself in a cage. Liz is now convinced that Charm is being tortured by the woman who claims to be her mother. 

Kory returns to the room and tells Liz to stay put and it is not safe out there but she is determined to be a savior. 

Faith is busy in her fantasy land where Kory is the Green Lantern and seducing her. So she doesn’t see Liz crawling into the room to steal the key to Charm’s room. When she sees Faith alone and responding to her fantasies, she is disgusted. 

Liz goes to Charm’s room who makes sure the home invader understands that she is not a captive but a monster. Since Charm is provoked, she goes into seizure mode and this time begins to transform into the porcupine monster. Liz runs away screaming.

Liz and Kory decide to save Charm from whatever stuff Faith has been giving her that turns her into a monstere and the first step of the plan is boinking Faith’s head with a pan. 

When she awakens, she finds herself tied to a chair. There is more discussions regarding faith and God but that doesn’t lead anywhere. Liz goes to Charm while Faith pleads with Kory to let her go. He refuses to help her and is then attacked by the porcupine monster. 

Faith manages to free herself when she hears Charm calling for her. There are memory flashbacks that don’t make sense at the moment. It’s all supposed to be leading up to a twist. 

Liz and Faith get into a tiff and Liz decides to escape through a window. Kory is suffering because he has been stabbed by the porcupine monster. 

There’s just too much going on all of a sudden. 

A CREATURE WAS STIRRING Ending Explained

The creature has taken a hold of Charm and severely injured Kory. Kory lays beside Faith and asks if He will take him. Faith tells him that if He doesn’t, he can just come back. Kory is relieved for a second before the creature pounces on him and rips him apart. 

Faith is scared and nervous about the monster. She does some running about and we see glimpses of drugs, and her mixing medicines to find a cure for her daughter, and a suitcase which has pieces of her past. Which is mostly photographs and stuff. 

Faith remembers the promise she made to Charm when she told her she almost died during childbirth. Faith had promised her daughter that she would always pull her from the dark. And so she distracts the monster, and manages to stab and rip him in half she she could pull her daughter out. 

Everything is fine now, right? 

Wait. The twist is about to come. 

One week later, the blizzard is long over. The snow has thawed and it is a bright, sunny morning. 

Charm and Faith are having breakfast and all is right with the world. Faith goes outside and finds ambulances nearby. She also finds her suitcase with the photographs strewn about. She is picking flowers when she notices a photo of her and Kory from a party years ago. 

Kory and Liz were trying to “save” people and teach them to accept religion. Faith lures Kory and drugs him but he overdoses and dies. 

After that, everything Faith has been seeing has been part of her hallucination. Liz and Kory never broke into her house. She was having all those conversations with herself. 

She was hallucinating that Liz and Kory were there for dinner. She had pretended to be tied up. Charm’s temperature never reached anywhere near the 100s. 

Realizing her mother was constantly drugging her, she tries to escape. It wasn’t Liz who had jumped out the window, but Charm who had fallen on the tree branches and died. After the snow thawed out, her body was discovered. 

It’s not a pretty sight. Her eyes are looking on either side and she is still stuck to the thorny tree. 

Faith realizes that she had been hallucinating all this time and has a breakdown. 

The movie ends with the police taping up the whole area. 

And now it is time to ask whether all this really fits in with the story we have seen so far. If Liz and Kory were religious, why did she imagine them as home invaders? Was it because they were supposed to symbolize her guilt creeping into her mind all this time? 

Why did she see the porcupine monster? Was it supposed to be because of the needles and the drugs she had taken all these years? 

Why did Faith have these imaginary conversations about religion? Was it because she was considering being accepted or wondering if her life could have been saved if she had let Kory help her instead of drugging him? 

But it really doesn’t make sense that she imagines Liz crawling into her room while she is fantasizing and stealing a key. 

Faith’s mind is really twisted and damaged from all the illegal substances she had been ingesting. Perhaps she did want to be a good mother and save her daughter, which is why she imagined Liz trying to do just that. 

This is one explanation anyway. 

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