The body is just discovered outside the farmhouse in a pile of snow, either grotesquely frozen or grotesquely burned in some mysterious manner. Still another dies by-well, it’s impossible to say how, exactly. Another is thwacked on the head with a hammer-falling into a lake, where the body bobs around. One person is stabbed and left to die, bleeding out slowly. The other casualties (and there are others) aren’t dealt with such care. Stephen and his father struggle inside the car, sending it skidding in front of a truck when the screen goes dark. The movie’s first casualty, Mary’s husband, essentially takes place off screen. In another, she rushes into her farmhouse, then slams the door on her son’s fingers twice, drawing a great deal of blood. In one, she pushes his head under the water while she bathes him. What you really should be wondering, Mary, is how in the world a 9-year-old kid got to your super-secluded, über-rural abode in the first place. The kid’s in the house, OK? One need not be a well-educated child psychologist to figure this out.

The unused crawl space the door to which seems strangely ajar … But still, it’s yet another thing to ponder as she considers the scratching she hears in the walls. As she tells a friend, she’s “weathered” worse. Mary’s not overly worried about the storm. Those storms can terrifically damaging, shutting down power for days and blocking roads for longer. Now, a brutal winter storm is bearing down on Maine. Her own shrink tells her that she’s likely just hallucinating a bit-the product of too much work and not enough sleep.īut then there are the little scratches she sees on Stephen’s face … Sometimes, she even sees him in doorways. And when he doesn’t rematerialize in the morning, everyone fears the worst: Surely Tom has frozen to death.īut Mary can’t shake the feeling that Tom’s still around. On a cold winter’s night in Maine, with the temperature dipping well below freezing. And when Mary calls Tom’s caretaker, the deaf boy suddenly … vanishes. Mary realizes this when the boy shows up at her rural Maine farmhouse, hiding in her car. Only now, suddenly, his caretaker plans to ship him off to Boston.īut Tom doesn’t want to go. But Mary’s convinced that he was making progress while in her psychiatric care.

Tom got in trouble for breaking another child’s arm at school, too, and he does seem to get a little touchy when touched. Sure, the kid had his problems: He’s deaf, for one thing, and parentless for another. One of them is Tom, a child about half Stephen’s age. Mary still finds time to work with other children when Stephen’s in front of the telly. Mary now doubles as his full-time caretaker: feeding him his porridge, bathing him, wiping his chin, hoisting him up in his wheelchair so he can watch television 12 hours a day. Then, as her husband was taking the kid to another school-the boarding variety for troubled teens-their car hit a semi head-on, killing her hubby and leaving Stephen essentially catatonic. The child psychologist’s troubles began the day that Stephen, her stepson, was expelled from school.

Shut in movie