HIDER IN MY HOUSE: DTMWaGL #48

It's called "phrogging" and your teen might be doing it right now

Hello friends! Why do I do this? Why did I decide, three and a half years ago, to start writing florid and absurd pieces about Lifetime movies, just thousands and thousands of words I’ve poured into this project, having previously written: basically nothing longer than a post? Am I “a” “writer”? Is that a thing I want to be? I didn’t really want to be a writer before I started writing this newsletter, and I still laugh whenever I try to talk about “my writing” to another human out loud. It’s funny! This isn’t writing. This is nothing. Maybe? I’ll tell you who’s a real writer though: the protagonist of HIDER IN MY HOUSE. This is a gal who writes. She’s a writer! This is a Lifetime movie by writers, for writers, let me tell you about it. (Content warnings for stalking, PTSD, child abuse/neglect, home invasion, and the word “hider”, which never actually appears in the film but it sure is in the title of this movie.)

We kick off in black and white, as a mother and father argue about their child, easily within earshot of said child. The father insists that the kid is violent, and he needs help, there are places they can send him, and the mother pleads to let him stay here. She has a plan! She will simply never ever upset her son, who for his part is playing with a wooden truck more aggressively than seems normal. The dad, Daniel, walks out, leaving the mom, Grace, alone with her son, who puts holes in the walls and scratches on her face. Grace tells her son she’ll keep him safe. He continues just really whaling on that truck.

Twenty years later, we’re back in that same apartment, but in color now, color having been invented in 2007. A pretty blonde named Molly has just bought it, and she is very smug that she could afford it because she just wrote a bestselling book, and also the asking price was suspiciously low? Probably for no reason, she and her sister Bella agree. Real estate is so cheap, it’s not even worth wondering about. Bella is going to live with Molly for a while, biding her time until her perfect boyfriend Carter asks her to move in with him. They head to the roof to drink wine and Bella is like, hey speaking of boyfriends, isn’t it time Molly got laid? The only laying Molly’s interested in is laying out the plot of her new book. It’s going really badly! Thank you for asking! Her first book was apparently based on some traumatic incident the sisters shared. Molly saved Bella’s life and processed it by writing about it, but it turns out that when she has to have another idea she is fucked. Molly has a meeting with her editor tomorrow, and she’s going to want to hear something other than “having ideas is impossible! How does anyone do it!”

The sisters have a somewhat eventful first night in their new apartment, as Bella hears a noise and gets up for some water, only to feel what might be a breeze coming from the bathroom mirror. One thing this movie taught me is that it is difficult for an actor to convincingly portray “I am feeling a mysterious breeze” with body language alone. It comes up a lot! Meanwhile, Molly has a dream about someone attacking her in her bed. Normally I just skip over telling you a character’s dream in a Lifetime movie (I never want to hear about anyone’s dreams, in any context), but there’s a real “maybe that happened” vibe here. In the morning, Molly and Bella agree that it’s weirdly drafty and chilly in here, and then Bella heads to work at “the firm” to work her big girl job. A schlubby guy with tie askew follows her for a little bit but it’s too early in the movie for this to be a guy they need to worry about.

Molly meets with her editor and pleads for more time, swearing she is this close to coming up with a follow-up to What Deadly Lies They Tell. Has she considered What Deadly Spa or What Deadly Isolation or What Deadly Mile High Club, I’m just spitballing here? Molly’s editor Heather pulls out the old “you’re only as good as your next book” chestnut and agrees to give Molly another week. She has some book signings for What Deadly Lies They Tell in the meantime anyway. Oh, here are some more things that can be deadly! A grudge, a dance competition. Et cetera.

At home, Molly tries and fails to write, even though I just gave her so many ideas. She hears a weird creaking noise behind a wall and thinks, “hmm,” but decides it’s fine, and anyway she told Bella she’d go to the grocery store and get some coffee. On the way back from the store, Molly spots the schlubby guy following her and ducks into a doorway to avoid him, but bumps into a moderately handsome man when she emerges from her hidey hole. Ope! Oh no! There’s groceries everywhere, it’s chaos! The handsome-adjacent man helps Molly pick up her groceries and his own, and introduces himself as Kyle. Hi, Kyle. Nice to meet-cute you. He offers to carry Molly’s groceries home for her, adding, “dangerous killers don’t walk around with groceries!” Dangerous killers are actually the intended use case of Gopuff. Molly agrees but then walks him to a random apartment building instead of her own because she is savvy. Then she mentions she just moved to the neighborhood and Kyle offers to show her around. Sure!

Over dinner, Bella chides her sister for letting this guy get away without even getting his number. Bella is singularly committed to getting her sister laid, we salute Bella! But that night, while Bella sleeps, someone stands over her pulling her blanket down. This is not how we treat our queen! Bella wakes up to see a figure standing over her bed and pulls the blanket back up and over her face. By the time she works up the courage to turn on her lamp, the person is gone.

In the morning, Molly tries to reassure Bella that there wasn’t really a person yanking on her covers, that was just a dream! Like when they were kids and Bella would want to sleep with Molly because there was a monster in her room. Well! Maybe the hider in your house is a monster! The hidebehind of logging camp lore perhaps? It’s right there in the name. Bella reluctantly agrees that it might have been a dream, and Molly swears she wouldn’t let anyone hurt her. Unfortunately, Molly has already hurt Bella in a very real way: she brought home decaf from the store. Molly realizes she mixed up her groceries with that guy Kyle’s when they bonked into each other, and now she’ll never get it back!

Or maybe she will: Kyle is, at this very moment, walking past a bookstore advertising Molly’s book and a signing. He buys a book, because it’s the least you can do for a woman after you foist decaf upon her.

Molly has been trying to write all day. She’s tried staring at an empty Word document and she’s also tried staring at an empty Word document some more, and nothing has worked. She hears a loud thud behind the wall of her living room, but her freaking out about that is cut short when Bella calls Molly to inform her that her perfect boyfriend Carter surprised her with a candlelit dinner. Sorry, she can’t get takeout and watch a movie with Molly tonight. Perfectly fine except that Molly’s phone said it was 9:23 p.m. What are they, Spanish? It is well past dinnertime. Molly decides to just fill her claw-foot tub and have a wine bath instead of dinner, but she’s not as alone as she thinks she is. Someone is watching her through a little hole in the wall! This apartment has everything. That night, Molly has another dream that unfortunately I must tell you about: she is being held captive and there’s also a music box. That’s as much as I can muster, and as much as Molly, who wakes up and cries, can handle.

It’s time for Molly’s reading! She reads from her book What Deadly Lies They Tell, a passage about a woman being stalked, and then everyone claps. Hooray for Molly! Hooray for writers! Such a noble and real profession. Kyle made it to the reading, and he waits in line to have his book signed, and also to give Molly his number and give her the real coffee back. Stop holding up the line, Kyle!!

Bella’s perfect boyfriend Carter has freed her to go back to her sister’s apartment and yell at her for not wanting to call this guy whose groceries she knocked over one time. Molly keeps saying she can’t date, needs to write, and Bella tells her that it’s been four years since the incident, she has to get back out there. Molly tells her it’s not that easy, every time a guy looks at her she thinks it could be him. Bella is sympathetic, but in the way that coupled people are sympathetic to single people: I have a boyfriend and it’s pretty great! You should consider it! So, after another text from her editor, Molly spies the book Kyle wrote his number in on her bed (hmm, didn’t she leave it in the kitchen? mysterious) and calls to ask him out. He’s rereading her book right now and he’d love to get dinner! I’m rereading Gravity’s Rainbow right now (this is true) and Thomas Pynchon hasn’t called to ask me out, am I doing something wrong?

Kyle and Molly go on a date and it’s been a while for both of them. We know Molly is a bestselling author, what’s Kyle do? Real estate. Oh. Well, I’m sure he has other qualities. The date goes well and Kyle walks Molly home, to her real building this time. He’s familiar with this building, and her penthouse apartment has an interesting history she should have been informed of before the sale. When a realtor says “interesting history” they never mean something that would be on The Memory Palace, they mean something like: the previous owners, a husband and wife and their son, simply vanished one day, and everyone who’s rented it since has left within a month. But Molly just went ahead and bought it! Ha ha! Ain’t that a thing. She doesn’t scare easy anyway, because of something that happened in her last apartment, but that’s a second date story, she says. Kyle tells Molly he’d love to see her infamous apartment sometime, but he knows she has to get back to writing. Molly figures that she might as well go whole fuckin’ hog with this date thing, and invites him up.

Kyle walks around Molly’s apartment, marveling at all the original detail, not like the trash he develops and sells! “You can barely even tell there’s a hider in here,” he adds. No, actually, what he really says, I swear, is “These walls, they hear it all.” Molly is so into it and they smooch and she pulls him into her room. Presumably some vigorous and healthy lovemaking ensues, and at some point Kyle wakes up to find himself alone in Molly’s bed. After he walks around and also feels a mysterious breeze from the bathroom mirror, he finds Molly. She’s in Bella’s room, and she says that she has a hard time sleeping in a new place, she wakes up and it feels wrong. Kyle asks if this relates to the second date story she mentioned, and if so: it’s past midnight, so this can be date number two. My man, at least go into the hallway and come back inside if you want to pretend this is a new date. Maybe part your hair differently? Molly says no, and they get back in bed, Kyle promising that Molly is safe with him.

Molly wakes up to a text from her editor asking what the fuck is up with those pages Molly is supposed to be writing and wishing her luck with her signing today. So many signings! “Good morning,” says Kyle, and Molly says she has a busy day ahead, and this is all well and good except that when Molly got a text we see that her phone says it is 1:42. If! You are going! To put the phone on camera! Change the time on the phone to something that makes sense!!!!! “Good morning” indeed, this movie does not respect me at ALL.

Fine anyway, Molly does her reading, and everyone claps for her again. God, what a fucking dream. Me standing in front of a bunch of people reading, I don’t know, my recap of THE SINNERS and then everyone claps. Wow! Imagine. I should try standup. That’s a thing a normal healthy person thinks. In the very appreciative (perhaps excessively appreciative) audience, Molly spots that guy who’s been following her around, and afterwards he introduces himself. He’s Detective Kramer, and he tells Molly that her apartment is part of a cold case, so if she could give him a call to talk about it, that would be great. See, Molly needn’t have worried she was being stalked, it was just a cop following her around, and a cop would never do anything bad.

Molly goes down to the station, and Kramer fills her in with a big pile of backstory: her apartment was indeed formerly occupied by a couple and their adult son, who had a lot of behavioral issues his whole life, with his mom homeschooling him and keeping him inside. You remember from reading this 12 minutes ago. The mom died of cancer and then a few months later the father (Daniel) and son (Ethan) disappeared. Daniel’s mistress reported him missing, we love a responsible mistress, and the last trace of them was Ethan withdrawing a bunch of money from an account his mom Grace set up for him. So maybe Ethan killed his dad? Just brainstorming. Also, somehow, Daniel’s mistress was the person who actually owned the apartment and sold it to Molly. Well I guess his wife was dead, so, fine. Kramer thinks there must be something in Molly’s apartment that would help him figure out what happened here. Nope, says Molly, but what an interesting story! Oh her little writer brain is firing. Pew pew, here come some words!

As she gets home, Molly’s editor texts her again, and for once, Molly actually sits down to write! Even though she’s an actual professional bestselling author, she does not have a desk and sits with her laptop in a variety of concerning ways, such as: propped on her side on the couch with the laptop in front of her, and sitting on the floor with the laptop on the coffee table. She writes and writes until Kyle shows up at her door with sushi (how’d he get in the supposedly secure building? oh he caught the door, don’t worry about it). They eat dinner on Molly’s rooftop porch, and by the way, it dawned on me at some point that this movie takes place in St. Petersburg, Florida? I like that. People live in places other than Los Angeles, New York, and the suburbs of Los Angeles, and they deserve representation in Lifetime movies too.

Kyle stays over again, and Molly has her bad dream again, and this is enough of a second date that she tells Kyle her trauma. Years ago, someone broke into her and Bella’s apartment, tied Molly to a chair, and arranged a bunch of her precious things, including a music box her dad gave her, on the coffee table. Bella was able to cut her loose and the two of them screamed loud enough to wake the neighbors and scare the guy off, but he was never caught. He could be anyone! He could be Detective Kramer, or Hunter Biden. So yeah, she’s had a hard time recovering from that. Writing her novel helped, but lately she’s felt that fear creeping back in. Just gotta write your way out, like Alexander Hamilton in the hit Broadway musical Hamilton.

In the morning, Molly catches up with her sister, and they plan a double date, and the double date is immediately executed because these are women of action. It goes fine, Carter’s firm does real estate law and he vaguely remembers the whole “mistress gets the apartment” thing about Molly’s apartment. Apparently it was quite the bit of scuttlebutt in real estate law circlezzzzzzzzz whoops! Sorry! After the date, Molly’s editor calls to tell her she loved the treatment she sent over, but that true crime is a whole other thing from fiction and she has to get it right. Find one more twist. Go to that Best Buy to see if there’s a pay phone. Et cetera. Molly agrees to keep researching and find another twist, and says good night to Kyle.

Molly pulls out her laptop and gets to googling, the only research tool she can think of. She finds a story about Daniel and Ethan Chambers, but then she hears another thunk in her wall. Enough is enough, let’s get to the bottom of this. Walls should not thunk! Molly follows creaking noises to the little hole next to her bathroom mirror, which turns out to be a very big hole actually, big enough for a hider to fit through for sure. She sticks her head in the hole and looks around, but before she can hop in, there’s a knock at the door. Oh hi Kyle! Wow, really good timing. Kyle looks in the hole and theorizes that maybe there was a fire in the apartment a long time ago and they kind of shoddily walled it off? Oh sure that makes so much more sense than a hider. Molly asks if the hidey hole is her property or what (hey have y’all seen Barbarian), and Kyle says he can figure that out and also board up the hole. Molly needs to get back to writing. She does that for a while but then takes a nap because it’s ?:?? o’clock and she’s been up since ??:??? what is time in this movie. Molly has her bad dream again and when she wakes up, she retrieves her prized music box from her dresser and sets it on the coffee table. Then she crouches next to her laptop like a goblin and looks up Daniel’s mistress. She meets up with this woman, Gayle, but honestly I wrote a whole paragraph about it and then realized there’s no new information in it. Ethan and Daniel didn’t get along and now they’re gone! The end.

Molly gets home after her pointless coffee date and realizes that her music box isn’t where she left it, and it’s not in the dresser either. Also, important, there’s someone sneaking around her apartment, perhaps…hiding in it?? Molly doesn’t know that though, Molly is concerned with her music box. She calls Bella to ask if maybe she’s been over and she took the precious and meaningful memento of both her childhood and that time she thought she was going to get murdered, haha, just asking? Bella says no, she did not, and decides to come over.

More writing! Molly is writing away when her editor texts her that the publishers she talked to liked Molly’s idea but it needs more. Molly hears this as: she should go in the hole. This is her hole! It was made for her! She calls her sister and then hey fuck it, let’s go in the hole. What’s in there? A lot of garbage, a folding chair, a toilet (that I guess is hooked up to something??), a duffel bag full of cash, and oh no, a bed with a little nightstand, and what’s on the nightstand? Molly’s music box and a copy of her novel! There’s also the hider, who knocks Molly out with a blow to the back of the head. That’s the hider way, a hider promise fulfilled.

Bella, on her way to Molly’s, checks her phone, listens to the snotty message her sister left her about going in a hole, and is like, hm, I better get a move on. Molly, meanwhile, is waking up in the hole. She wanders around the hole area like it’s an open house. Ah, through this peephole, here’s my bathroom, lovely claw-foot tub, oh a tiny door into my sister’s closet! Spacious. Molly wiggles through the little door and calls Kyle because she still has not figured this shit out, but she finally does indeed figure this shit out when she hears his phone buzzing inside the apartment. He walks into Bella’s room and Molly looks up at him and says, “Ethan.” Yeah, Molly! Ethan!

Well, okay, so Kyle is Ethan. Kyle is the hider in the house. He has conflated Molly with his mom, he knew she’d come back and keep him safe. When his dad told him they had to move he had to kill him, and we get a little flashback of Ethan standing over his dad’s body with a hammer. Ethan is holding a hammer and the nail is: what am I gonna do with this body and how can I stay in this apartment? Easy, he can just smash through the wall, wander through the bowels of the building until he finds an elevator shaft to drop the body down and then build himself a hidey hole, for hiding. All with this one simple hammer!

Molly still has some questions, even though Ethan was really pretty clear about his whole deal. Why did he take her music box? Ethan earnestly explains that it was haunting her, he was helping! He fell for her from the moment he saw her, so he had to watch her. She fell for him too, you know. Molly asks what comes next, and he’s like, I live here, forever? She doesn’t like that plan and runs to the bathroom, grabs a hammer, and goes into the hole. It’s always hammers with these people. Kyle breaks down the bathroom door just as Bella gets home and calls for Molly. Bella didn’t come equipped with her own hammer and is therefore defenseless as Kyle grabs her and pulls her down the hole hallway. “Not again, not again!” Molly sobs, and: oof, but also, this is not precisely the same situation. I have sympathy but.

In the basement, Kyle holds Bella at the edge of the elevator shaft and yells for Molly, who eventually emerges from the shadows. She calmly tells Ethan that they can stay together, these walls can protect us both, and he lets Bella go. Molly tells him that she’s still scared but they can protect each other, it’s ours now. She takes his hand and promises that she will keep him safe, and then whacks him into the elevator shaft. Oh so she was lying. “There’s only one way I can stay here forever, Molly,” he says, and then he lets go of Molly’s hand. And listen, I tried to tie this story together in a coherent and compelling way and then I realized I was struggling so hard because the writers of this movie didn’t really do a great job at that either.

The movie ends with Molly doing a reading of her new book. She wrote it with Bella (nice to give her a credit, considering the first book was also about a trauma you shared), and it’s called What Lies Behind the Walls. And then everyone claps! Again! The end, clap clap clap!