Housebound 2014

Kylie Bucknell, a young woman carrying the weight of a troubled past, finds herself in a tight, uncomfortable corner after a failed attempt to steal an ATM safe lands her in custody. Instead of prison, she is sentenced to eight months of house arrest, living under the vigilant care of her mother, Miriam. The arrangement is tense from the start: Kylie and Miriam clash, and she has an even rockier relationship with her step-father, Graeme. To keep her within bounds, a security contractor named Amos explains a simple, blunt truth—the ankle monitor strapped to Kylie will ping the police the moment she leaves the house.

From the start, the atmosphere in the house feels divided and brittle, with each resident living with their own expectations and fears. Miriam insists the house is haunted, a claim that seems ridiculous to Kylie at first, a small-town superstition dressed up as maternal worry. Yet strange things begin to happen: a disembodied hand grabbing in the basement, unexplained noises, and a creeping sense that someone or something is watching. Kylie’s skepticism clashes with Miriam’s belief, and the tension intensifies as Amos arrives not just as a monitor but as a live presence in their home. When a breach triggers the ankle monitor, Amos is the one who responds, and Miriam’s fear seems to take on a life of its own as she pushes the idea that the house is haunted into reality.

What follows blends domestic anxiety with a creeping sense of the supernatural. Kylie, already on edge, starts to experience more unsettling phenomena, and the line between a real intruder and a haunted house becomes blurred. Dennis, a clinical psychologist who works with Kylie and Miriam, grows increasingly concerned that the women are drifting into delusions rather than any actual haunting. His professional concern is matched by the grim history of the house itself: Graeme reveals that their home sits on the site of a former halfway house, a place with a dark past, including a murder that still echoes in the walls. The discovery of a partial denture among the evidence compounds the mystery and hints at a human culprit behind the violence, not just a ghost.

What seems like a supernatural mystery starts leaning toward a real-world conspiracy. Kylie and Amos learn that their neighbor wears a denture, and in a desperate moment Kylie secretly breaks into the neighbor’s house to retrieve it. She escapes back to her own home, but the stress of the night leaves her rattled and panicked, culminating in a tragic accident: she stabs Graeme in a moment of fear and fury. The attempted investigations continue as Amos tries to confront the neighbor once more, but the neighbor denies any killer identity and instead tells a troubling backstory about a young savant named Eugene—an expert at mechanics and electronics who had been adopted by the neighbor and who disappeared about a year earlier. The image of Eugene’s skills adds a new, almost eerily plausible dimension to the haunting: someone could be using the house’s hidden passages to move unseen.

Driven by fear and curiosity, Kylie discovers secret hallways beneath the house and comes face to face with Eugene himself. The confrontation is tense but charged with a strange mixture of dread and possibility. Kylie and Amos hurry to the police station to corroborate what they’ve found, but the police find no concrete evidence to back their claims. Dennis, still wary of delusions, pushes for institutionalizing Kylie, and in a shocking moment, Kylie learns that Dennis wears a partial denture of his own. The revelation shakes her trust, and when she digs into Dennis’s past and his ties to the halfway house, he lashes out, attempting to kill Miriam and Kylie while incapacitating Amos.

With danger looming, Kylie and Miriam flee into the house’s labyrinthine tunnels, where they encounter Eugene once more. The revelation hits hard: all the alleged paranormal activity has, at its core, been driven by Eugene’s presence. Yet Eugene’s demeanor is not hostile; at first, they fear him, but they come to realize he means them no harm, and he even seems to become a quiet, benevolent observer within the household. The balance of power shifts in an instant when Dennis stabs Eugene, knocks Kylie unconscious, and begins to strangle Miriam. Eugene awakens Kylie, handing her a weapon that allows her to turn the tables and stab Dennis in retaliation. In a dramatic twist, Eugene flips a switch and a surge of high voltage erupts, destroying Dennis in a violent explosion.

In the aftermath, the people who survived begin to heal. Months pass, and life starts to settle into a wary routine. Amos removes Kylie’s ankle monitor, signaling a fresh sense of freedom and trust. Eugene, once a mysterious threat, has begun to integrate into the household in a way that is mostly unseen but unmistakably present. The story closes on a note of uneasy peace, with the surviving family members rebuilding their lives around the quiet, unusual presence of Eugene, who remains an almost ghostly participant in their daily world but one who has earned a reluctant acceptance.

This tale threads together elements of a claustrophobic domestic thriller with a haunting that is at once literal and human. It refuses to stay neatly in one genre, instead weaving psychological tension, family dynamics, and a slowly disclosed past into a single, relentless narrative. The characters’ struggles—Kylie’s fight to break free within the confines of house arrest, Miriam’s insistence on a supernatural explanation, Graeme’s hidden history, Amos’s protective stubbornness, Dennis’s dangerous ambitions, and Eugene’s enigmatic role—combine to create a story that feels intimate and unnervingly communal. The result is a long, suspenseful ride through a house where perception collides with history, danger lurks behind quiet walls, and the line between hauntings and human schemes proves perilously thin.