That Final Girl Life

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Script:

Haters and gentlefriends, welcome to That Final Girl Life. It’s your new favourite final girl here, taking you through The Horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends. 

I can’t believe I need to say this, but apparently it’s a whole thing now: I am an actual real live human being, not an AI. I physically write all my scripts. I watch the movies at least twice before I do an episode on them. Any resources I use, like other people’s articles which I’ve found helpful, will be in the show notes. 

In this episode we’ll be discussing the deeply claustrophobic movie The Descent, and its rage-fuelled final girl, Sarah. Please be aware that there will be spoilers throughout the episode. There will also be spoilers for The Descent Part 2, which I won’t be focusing on in any great depth, but it will come into the equation towards the end.  

In this episode I’ll be talking about grief, child loss, suicide, men having affairs, betrayal in friendship, being stuck in small spaces, and of course, PTSD.

Ready? Strap on your climbing gear and make sure your arrogant friend hasn’t left the map in the car as we make our way down into… 

The Descent. 

We begin with a group of friends white water rafting. They’re visibly having a fantastic time, and it sets us up with the concept of a group of adventurous women who are getting the absolute most out of life. 

Sarah’s husband and daughter are waiting for them on the bank. The drive back from the river is frosty between the couple, but Sarah doesn’t know why. Just as they’re about to get into it, there’s a graphic car crash and Sarah wakes up in the hospital, screaming for her daughter. Who, we quickly learn, is dead. Along with her husband. 

Cut to a year later. The group of friends meet up in the Appalachian mountains for a cave-based adventure. We learn that it’s the first time Sarah’s met up with them all since the accident, and they’re planning to take it easy in some Level 2 caves, which apparently means ones that have already been thoroughly checked out and therefore should be pretty straightforward for a group of experienced climbers. 

Except that there’s a bunch of unsubtle foreshadowing that hints at their trip being ill-fated. Crows, a dead deer, bloody grooves inside the cave in the shape of fingerprints, a whole flock of bats suddenly taking to the sky… it’s almost as if something’s trying to tell them this is a bad idea. 

But I’ve never met a woman who wasn’t skilled at ignoring a red flag, so down they go. They crawl through the first tunnel between caves. This film is not for the claustrophobic. 

Sarah is the last to come through, and she has one of the rope bags with her. However, she panics halfway down the tunnel and one of the others has to go in and extract her. Assuming it’s just anxiety, she talks to Sarah and reassures her. “You can breathe…” And then the stone shifts, and they both realise the tunnel is about to cave in. A mad scramble manages to get them both out to the other side, but the rope bag is lost. 

This is a concerning situation even for people who are regular cavers. Juno, the adventurous one whose idea this was, is asked to bring out the map so they can get their bearings. But Juno has left the map in the car. Deliberately, it turns out. 

“I put in a flight plan for Boreham Caverns,” says Rebecca, “and this isn’t Boreham Caverns, is it?” 

In other words, they’re stuck down here and no one is coming to look for them. Not only that, but they’re in a completely undiscovered cave system, full of unknown dangers, purely because of Juno’s hubris. Everyone is very angry. But they have to set that aside and try to find a way out. 

They look for an exit. Crawl through some more tunnels. Come up to a huge gaping pit. It’s deep. Very deep. 

Most of them manage to get across. Juno goes last, insisting on collecting the equipment on the way. “We’ll need everything we’ve got,” she says, referencing the missing rope bag. Which is true, but also another example of Juno wanting to be the main character once again. 

On the other side of the pit, they find signs that they are not the first to have ever been down here. There is equipment there which is around 100 years old. And, both more and less surprisingly: cave art. They realise it shows that there are two entrances to the cave system, which means they do have a shot at finding a way out. Encouraged, they carry on. 

Holly – a young, boisterous friend of Juno’s – races ahead, not fully checking where she’s going, and promptly falls down a deep hole. Her leg is fucked. I’m sure that’s not the medical term, but it’s true. There’s, like, a bit of bone sticking out and shit. It’s gnarly. 

Luckily one of them is a med student, so she sets the leg in a splint while Sarah looks around to try to work out which way they should go next. As she peers into the darkness, she sees something strange: a human figure – a man, she thinks – running away down the corridor. She tells the others, who are skeptical. Juno just straight-up doesn’t believe her. 

Things are tense in the group: people are hurt, people are angry, all of them are desperate to get out. They press on and stumble across what I described in the notes I was making as a “boneyard.” I don’t know if that’s an actual word, but I mean a kid of pit full of bones, like where Scar and the hyenas hang out in The Lion King. It is here that they discover Sarah was neither exaggerating nor hallucinating: there are in fact kinda semi-human people things down here, but they’re… creatures more than people, really. Pale, wet and screechy, with an appetite for human flesh. Not the best news. 

Holly, the injured member of the group, promptly gets eaten. This incites a huge, bloody fight scene in which I couldn’t keep track of everything that was happening but it looked like it would have been a lot of fun to film. 

Juno, in a moment of panic, whips around and stabs the creature behind her, only to discover that she’s stabbed her friend Beth in the neck. Beth falls to the ground, and Juno… leaves her there. To die. Alone. With the terrifying creatures. 

We’re definitely not meant to like Juno. 

We cut to Sarah, who’s passed out but is now waking up. She realises that the creatures can’t see and that they hunt using sound, a realisation two of the other women are simultaneously coming to in a different part of the cave. Nonetheless, they still get attacked by the creatures… until Juno saves them. She tells them Holly and Beth are dead. The others share their newfound knowledge about how the creatures use sound to locate their prey. They start to move off in search of an exit, but Juno says she’s not leaving without Sarah. 

Meanwhile Sarah has been experiencing a revelation of her own: she has come across Beth, who is still bleeding out where Juno left her. Beth tells Sarah what happened and begs Sarah to kill her. Reluctantly, Sarah does. 

Sarah then has an epic fight scene all of her own, which includes the iconic shot of her lying in what looks like a literal pond of blood, but might just be water under the red lights of the torches they’re carrying. 

It’s a very cool fight scene. My Notes app contains phrases like “Blood spurty eye!” and “Fuckin badass.” 

We cut back to the other three, who find themselves surrounded by creatures. They try to run, but two of them get eaten. Only Juno survives, and even then just barely. She ends up fighting a creature underwater, dragging herself out, pulling herself up a wet, slippery cave wall… 

…and Sarah grabs her and pulls her to safety. 

Sarah is visibly furious with Juno. She asks if Beth is dead, and if Juno saw her die. Juno nods. They move on together. 

Another big gory fight scene awaits them when more creatures attack. During a brief lull in which the creatures have retreated, Sarah reveals that she knows what Juno did to Beth. Hearing the creatures beginning to creep closer again, Sarah wounds Juno, who screams. Sarah then turns and leaves Juno to be killed, just like she left Beth. 

As Sarah runs, Juno screams. It’s left ambiguous whether this is purely uncontrolled horrific screaming, or whether she’s deliberately screaming to keep them off Sarah’s trail. I’ll leave you to decide what you want to believe about Juno here. 

Sarah scrambles up a steep wall littered with bones. She reaches the top, pushes through some overgrowth and bursts forth into the sunlight. 

She races through the woods, finds the car and drives away. When a huge truck full of logs passes her, Final Destination-style, she stops and pulls over, trying to pull herself together. When she glances to her right, she sees the ghost of Juno appear beside her, and she screams. 

Somehow, in the twenty years since I last watched it, I had entirely forgotten the grief part of the storyline. The film begins with Sarah losing her husband and child in a horrible accident, and then the context of the caving expedition is that it’s the first time she’s met up with all her friends since that happened. 

Which means the whole film can easily be read as a metaphor for grief. I’m going to start by talk about the movie as being potentially that, and then later on in the episode I’ll discuss Sarah’s post-Descent life if the events in the caves actually happened. A lot of this will overlap anyway; the grief is there regardless of whether or not it’s the whole story. When Sarah gets stuck in the tunnel and her friend is trying to encourage her not to panic and to move forward, she says “The worst thing that could possibly happen to you has already happened. This is just a poxy cave.” 

A sudden, unexpected loss incurs a different kind of grief from a loss you’ve been expecting. If you were present for the actual death and it happened in a traumatic way, as is the case with Sarah, the level of trauma would be horrific. Watching a pole spear your husband and daughter right through their heads is not something most people are psychologically prepared for. 

Yet the husband is largely absent from what we see of Sarah’s grief in the film. I think the only time he comes up – please correct me if I’m wrong – is when we learn that Juno was having an affair with him, something that was hinted at in the opening sequence by the river and is confirmed in the caves. Even then, it’s not spoken about directly: “Sarah’s not the only one who lost something in that accident,” Juno says to Beth at one point. 

Losing someone you’re in a relationship with when that relationship has some pretty big issues will often bring up some really complicated feelings. At the beginning of the movie we’re led to believe that Sarah doesn’t know anything about the affair; that her husband is being distant and weird, but she doesn’t know why. Still, I don’t think the drive home from the river will be the first time her husband has been acting strangely. Probably he’s been cagey and secretive, doing all the classic things: coming home at odd hours, “working late,” not wanting to be intimate with Sarah as much as before, and so on. 

So Sarah had probably been feeling the distance for some time, and wondering about it. This might mean that by the time he dies, a part of her has already been pre-grieving the relationship. Often we intuit something long before we properly know it, which is why by the time a confrontation and confession happens, it’s sometimes past the point of no return already. Communication has broken down gradually over a period of weeks or months; trust is frayed almost to breaking point; and it’s then very difficult to rebuild. 

So perhaps in some ways, her husband’s affair might have softened the grieving process for Sarah. Beyond which, grieving the loss of a child is its own particular kind of horror. That was probably always going to overshadow the loss of her husband, even if their relationship had been fine. 

Part of my PhD is about child loss: baby loss, to be specific. The reason I’m looking into that is because I think it has a different flavour from other kinds of loss, from a selfhood perspective. 

What do I mean by that? 

In Western philosophy, and in popular culture more generally, we tend to think of death as something that brings meaning to life. In Only Lovers Left Alive, the existential vampire horror starring Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, we can see this played out on screen. The vampires have eternal life, and therefore they’re bored: life has lost a lot of its meaning. There’s surely only so much you can do before eternity becomes a drag. Unless you’re the crew from What We Do In The Shadows, of course, who seem to be capable of centuries of fun. 

But the idea goes: life is meaningful because it is finite; death makes life finite; therefore, death makes life meaningful. This is why a brush with death can cause people to re-evaluate their lives. It’s also an explanation for the classic midlife crisis – suddenly you realise you’re halfway through your probable lifespan already, and what do you have to show for it? Where are you now, compared to where you thought you’d be; where you wanted to be? 

Heidegger was a German philosopher who wrote a lot about what it means to be human. He spoke about what I’ve just mentioned: the idea that death brings meaning to life, and that realising you’re going to die can prompt that kind of existential crisis where you’re like, oh shit, what am I doing with my life? At this point, Heidegger says, you basically have two options: you can either face up to where you are in life and make any changes you want to make, or you can stick your fingers in your ears, ignore it and try to just keep going while the nagging realisation that you haven’t lived up to your potential gradually eats away at your insides until you die anyway, like we all will. 

I’m editorialising a bit. But that’s the general vibe. 

Heidegger spoke about what kinds of things might remind us of death in this way. Other philosophers have carried on with this theme. Experiences like becoming disabled or losing a loved one can surely make us think about our own death and how we might want to have been living before it happens. I know my own experience of becoming a wheelchair user definitely prompted some existential thoughts, although to be fair I was already kind of prone to that anyway. 

For Heidegger, though, losing somebody else doesn’t really count. This sheds light on one of the main criticisms of Heidegger: that his philosophy is too individualistic, and doesn’t account for the fact that other people are really important to us and can have a hugely significant impact on our lives. 

I think Heidegger would say that he’s not denying that other people are important, though. Rather, he’s saying that what you lose when you lose someone else is not the same as what you lose if you yourself die. If you die, you lose the whole of yourself. If you become disabled – let’s say an accident paralyses you from the waist down – then you lose such a hugely significant part of yourself that your life will never look the same again. Whereas if you lose someone else, even someone very close to you, you are still you afterwards, even if you’ve been affected by the experience. 

You might validly argue, along with many modern-day philosophers, that this underestimates the value of other people to our lives. We do become different people when we lose someone important. Life isn’t ever quite the same again. And that’s true. 

I think Heidegger’s trying to say something a bit more subtle here, though, and this forms part of the basis of my PhD thesis. What Heidegger is doing is not saying other people aren’t important, or that we aren’t changed by their deaths in important ways. What he’s saying is that we tend to understand what a ‘self’ is by referring to a continuity of identity. In other words, whilst of course people change and develop and learn over time, not all of us changes at once. There’s some kind of continuity there, even if it’s difficult to specifically point to. In losing someone I love, I lose their self from my life: the relationship is important, but it’s not my self that I lose. And even when I’ve lost them, I still remain in some kind of relationship with them even after they’re dead, by remembering them and holding their memory with me as I move through my life. 

At the end of last year I lost three friends in quick succession. One in particular has been hard to cope with, because we spoke almost every day and she was someone I talked to often about my thesis. I was finding the grief almost unbearable until I printed out a picture of her and put it in a little frame which hangs off the corner of the book stand on my desk. Now I can still talk to her every day about my PhD, even though she’s not there anymore. And although this doesn’t make the grief go away, it does make it less difficult to live with, because it reminds me that alongside the tragic loss of Nina I also hold the wonderful memory of who she was in my life. 

OK, Chindi, I hear you say, but why are you talking about your friends dying and German philosophy when you’re supposed to be talking about a cave-based horror movie? 

I’m getting there, I promise. 

When we lose a friend or a partner, we lose who they were to us. But they were always their own separate person, too. Although the bond might have been really strong, there will always have been parts of their life we didn’t have access to. Perhaps we met when we were in our 20s; perhaps we’re siblings but we went to different universities; regardless, most of the relationships we have are very much between two separate selves: us and them. 

But then there’s the loss of a child. Here we go. We’re getting to it. 

A child is a person in their own right, of course. But the relationship between parent and child is different from any other relationship, I believe, in terms of selfhood. Very few parents decide to have children and just… wait to see what comes out. Most, if not all, parents have ideas regarding who they want their children to be, and usually those ideas will have something to do with who they themselves are. Often, parents fill their children with projections of who they wish they’d been able to be. I’ve seen this so much in my work as a therapist: people deciding to have children because they feel like it’s too late for them to feel fulfilled in themselves, so they have kids hoping that they’ll get a kind of secondhand fulfilment through them instead. Which rarely works, by the way, and often leads to things like parents pushing their kids into living in ways that really don’t suit them, which causes resentment and anger and on and on… 

But a certain degree of identification with your child, and wanting them to be like you in some way, is completely normal. Few of us would want a family full of people we don’t get on with, or have nothing in common with. Think about it: what would you struggle with? I don’t have children and I don’t plan to, but if I somehow ended up with one, I’m pretty sure I would struggle if I got a really energetic, extraverted child who constantly wanted to be on the go. Perhaps you’d struggle with a really quiet child, or a messy one, or one who cried easily. 

So with children specifically, we have this thing where parents place a lot of their selfhood onto or into the child, more than we tend to do with adults who already have fully formed personalities when we meet them. (Of course there are plenty of ways children can come into our lives when they already have noticeable personalities – adoption, for example – but I’m trying to keep it relatively simple so that this episode isn’t like three hours long.) 

What might this mean, then, for a parent who’s lost a child, from a Heideggerian perspective? That’s probably not something you expected to be asked in a horror movie podcast! But it’s interesting to think about. Because if Heidegger’s right that the death of another person doesn’t completely bring us into a relationship with our own death because of their separateness from us, and if it’s also true that children aren’t seen as fully separate selves by their parents, then there’s something kind of extra going on when someone loses a child. 

I don’t necessarily mean the grief is worse, or more intense, although I think some people would probably argue that it is. What I mean is that I think it’s got a different existential flavour, because what we’re losing is something more like ourselves than anything else we could lose. 

So. I think Sarah would be in a pretty fucked-up state, is what I’m basically saying here. Not only has she lost her child – which, as we’ve just lengthily discussed, is a particularly existentially challenging kind of loss – she’s also lost her husband, with whom she had a complicated, probably thorny relationship right before he died. And she’s lost them both at the same time, in a horrific car crash which she was also in, and she saw the whole thing. 

One of my friends who’s also a therapist likes to reference the children’s book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt when she’s talking to clients about processing trauma. “You can’t go over it; you can’t go under it; you have to go through it.” And that’s true of grief, too. 

Immediately after the deaths, Sarah shuts down and doesn’t see her friends for a while. That’s completely normal. I say “normal”: there isn’t really a normal way to grieve. We all do it differently. But it’s OK when you’re processing something this huge to have to pull back a bit from your social life. 

Once she’s through that initial stage, which for me often involves a lot of staring blankly at walls and not doing very much else, then if we’re reading the movie as a metaphor, Sarah tackles her grief head-on. She descends down into the very depths of it, feeling things she’s never felt before in the process. 

It’s interesting that Juno is the one who forces them into the unknown cave system. Sarah and the others signed up for caving – she’s willing to face her grief – but Juno pulls them into something darker and much more dangerous than Sarah feels ready for. Of course Sarah survives – she has to, she’s our final girl – but just barely. And everyone else, including Juno herself, dies. 

Which, if we’re reading the film metaphorically, can be seen as Juno’s tendency to just carelessly forge whatever path she wants without thinking of others. The affair, for instance. And yes, Juno is grieving too. Just because their relationship was illicit doesn’t mean it didn’t include real love. But Juno is riding her grief right into the danger zone: allowing it to pull her into all her worst behaviours. This is so, so easy to do, and a level of that is almost expected. Even if we’ve done loads of work and managed to step away from unhelpful behaviours in general, grief might well send us spiralling back into old patterns. Juno was still in those patterns at the beginning of the film, and we see her losing all sense of care and humanity as the expedition goes on. 

Sarah, by contrast, becomes more and more determined. Sam is right when she talks Sarah through the tunnel: the worst thing has already happened, and yet Sarah is still here. So what now? Is she just going to give up, because life is too hard, and passively wait to die? That doesn’t sound like a final girl to me. 

Grief has this way of bringing up things you didn’t even know were inside you, and this is one way we could interpret the monsters. Whatever space the person was filling inside you, whatever part of you they fulfilled, is now empty, and into that emptiness is where the creatures creep. Suddenly you’re spending £300 on trinkets at 4 in the morning and completely forgetting about it until your porch is flooded with parcels. Or you discover that wine makes it all go away for a while, and it’s so much nicer when it goes away, so… more wine? Or you find yourself watching 365 horror movies in a year because they’re the only thing that touches the level of trauma you’ve experienced and then you somehow end up starting a podcast about them. 

Ahem. 

The monsters, potentially, could also just be people. Because the people around you become weird when you’re grieving. It’s not their fault: you’re being weird too. Grief fucks everything up, turns it upside down and inside out, makes everything not make sense. 

You might lose friends. Probably not by them dying in a previously unchartered cave system, but who knows? You might find yourself out of reach even of those friends who stick around. And then there are all the other people: the weird peripheral creatures in your life whom you have to deal with every day. Your colleagues, your neighbours, that woman who always sits diagonally across from you on the morning commute, the person who prepares your order in the artsy coffee shop at the end of your street. 

They’re suddenly so alien, with their smiles and their small talk and their freshly-laundered clothes. 

“NONE OF THIS MATTERS,” you want to scream at them, “HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY JUST BE CARRYING ON WITH LIFE WHEN THE WORLD HAS CAVED IN?”

But that’s the thing: theirs hasn’t. Grief is such a lonely process. 

Your friends can be there for you and can help you through parts of it, of course. But ultimately, you’re going to have to pull yourself through on your own strength as well. 

Which Sarah does, and she emerges gasping into the sunlight at the end of the film. It looks like a birth scene, which makes sense: coming out of a period of deep grief or other trauma can feel like being reborn into a world that’s unfamiliar, because it’s so very different from the one you left behind. 

So how does Sarah move forward? Regardless of whether the movie is a metaphor for grief or the events actually happened, Sarah is going to have some significant grieving still left on her plate after she’s gone through everything we see in the film. Now she’s not only grieving her husband and child, but also her lost friends. The final shot of the movie shows Sarah sitting in her car at the side of the road, turning to look at the passenger seat, and seeing an apparition of Juno. This understandably freaks her out. But it also fits in with how she’s been grieving throughout the film. We’ve seen several times that her daughter comes to her in dreams and apparitions, simultaneously freaking her out and sometimes also giving her a push to carry on. 

Now Sarah’s going to be haunted by even more apparitions. Although somehow I doubt that all the friends will be in them. We know Juno is, and I’d guess Beth might be too, given that Sarah herself had to kill her. 

She’ll be raw after leaving the cave system, physically and emotionally. We don’t talk enough about the physical effects grief can have, I think. Just last month, artist and author Marjane Satrapi died of a broken heart following the death of her husband. Many people experience physical symptoms as a result of grief, some temporary, others long-lasting. A friend of mine who had MS identified it having started when she had a particularly traumatic miscarriage and learned she would never be able to have biological children. The resulting pain brought on the MS, she always said, and then ultimately it was MS that killed her last year, when she went to Dignitas having reached a point where she just couldn’t cope with the aggressive nature of her symptoms any more. There are plenty of less fatal examples, too. People experiencing chest pains, migraines, functional neurological symptoms, all sorts of medical issues they’ve never had before. 

If we’re doing a straight reading of the movie, then as well as all the compounding losses, Sarah has also just climbed through a cave system and nearly died. She’s been exposed to all sorts of unknown bacteria, and undoubtedly swallowed some unidentified, semi-human blood. She’s been crushed by rocks, her muscles have been pushed to the limit, she’s trekked through dusty caverns filled with bones and water and previously-human mulch. What she’s breathed in during that time can’t have done her any favours. 

So Sarah has surely got to find herself with some weird physical symptoms. At least one mystery virus or bacterial infection, I’d imagine; definitely some aches and pains, probably a cracked rib or two. Once the adrenaline of dragging herself to safety wears off, she’ll be needing some proper medical attention. 

And she’s in a foreign country – she’s British and the caves are in the US – so she’ll have to deal with an unfamiliar and famously expensive medical system. 

In some ways, though, it might be psychologically helpful to her that her immediate medical care takes place before she flies home. It creates a separation, and hopefully arriving home will feel comforting; perhaps for the first time since her husband and daughter died. 

There will be a level of peace, at least in comparison to the caves and the hospital, but there will also be such a gaping emptiness. We don’t know if Sarah had some kind of corporate job alongside being a parent, but if she did, it wasn’t important enough to come up in the dialogue. She’s also just spent a bunch of time nearly dying in unending caverns and then recuperating in hospital, so by the time she comes home, she might not have a job to go back to. 

Given what we know about Sarah’s tendencies prior to meeting up with her friends, we can assume she’ll act similarly now that she has even more people to grieve. In my mind she’s in a gloomy house with big windows, the room lit with that particular shade of blue that tells us a scene is taking place at twilight. She’s wandering aimlessly around her stylish but now soulless home, occasionally picking up a photograph but putting it down before she properly looks at it. 

We discussed dissociation in the first episode, when we looked at Dani from Midsommar, and I think this is what Sarah will be doing now. A whole load of staring into space and not really being inside herself. She might even have some out-of-body experiences. She’ll definitely be hallucinating, since she was already doing that before. 

She will, in other words, be pretty haunted. Floating around her house like she too is a ghost, periodically invaded by the apparitions of the people she’s lost, still trying to come to terms with the death of her daughter but now also having lost all her friends, one of whom she had to kill. 

That’s gonna come back. Probably in her nightmares. She’ll wake up repeatedly drenched in sweat, sometimes remembering her horrible dreams, other times unable to recall what happened but feeling such a thick and dank dread that she’d almost rather deal with the horrible memories. 

The thing is, there’s not much for her anymore. She’s survived… for what? Now she’s just living with ghosts, and cosplaying as one of them. 

After a significant loss, people can of course pick up their lives and carry on, or change something and create a life that feels very different. But the level of loss Sarah has experienced, and the fact that (a) both incidents involved more than one loss and (b) both were particularly horrific in and of themselves, means that she’s unlikely to be able to do that, certainly not in the immediate aftermath. 

Which is where I think the concept of The Descent Part 2 actually makes sense. I don’t think it would be as quick as it’s portrayed in the second movie – a doctor is hardly going to allow an amnesiac patient to go clambering through a dangerous cave system a mere couple of days after she barely escaped it with her life – but I’d think that after a year, maybe even just a few months, Sarah might well feel like her only option is to go back to the caves again and try to bring her friends home, even though what she’ll be bringing back is only their remains. This works regardless of whether we read the film straight or see it as a metaphor: once again, she’s in a position where the only way out is through. 

So, a bit like in our first episode, this final girl doesn’t get a happy ending. The Descent Part 2 doesn’t give her one either: waking up with no memory of what happened, like I mentioned, she’s taken back to the caves by her doctor to see if they can find any of her friends down there alive. Once there, she runs off into the darkness and chaos ensues as the team are, of course, set upon by the creatures. 

Major spoiler warning: she doesn’t get out of the second film alive. She fights a solid fight and nearly makes it, but right at the end she screams, allowing the creatures to come for her so that one of the others has a fighting chance of escaping. Second spoiler warning: she doesn’t survive either. 

Which, unfortunately, also all makes sense, regardless of whether we’re looking at a movie or a metaphor. Of course logically, if the caves and the creatures are real, it’s pretty likely they’d eat her if they caught her. 

But even if it’s metaphorical, with a grief that huge…? 

Is it survivable? Yes. Is it easy to survive? Not at all. Plenty of people, faced with a level of grief that shatters the foundations of their world, won’t make it through. As far as we could tell, prior to the events of the first film, Sarah’s primary focus in life was parenting her child. Another important aspect was her adventures with her friends, where she got to let her hair down and feel the adrenaline rush of being in nature and recognising her place as a mere measly human. Now both of those are gone. So is her husband, so there isn’t even anyone to rebuild with. She could start again completely from scratch: make new friends, find a job, move to a new place, in time maybe even find a partner and start a new family. But it’s entirely understandable if what that would ask of her is just too much. She’s already lost everything. What’s the point of carrying on now? 

This has been kind of a depressing episode, I know. But that’s the thing about being a final girl: life doesn’t tend to come up roses afterwards. Some of us survive and carry on, like Cecilia from last week’s episode, but we’re forever changed. I’m in a wheelchair. I have lasting injuries in places you’d rather not even think about. Even before my disabilities had gotten to the stage they’re at now, I was severely affected in that I was a chronic workaholic. I’d have multiple jobs at any given time, working day shifts followed by evening shifts followed by nights and weekend shifts, because it felt better than feeling the aftereffects of trauma. When I was 37 I added up all the hours I’d worked in my life and discovered that if I’d worked each of my jobs one after the other like a normal person rather than several of them simultaneously, I would have done 45 years of work. No wonder I’m broken. My body assuming it’s, like, 65 and requires retirement now is in fact no surprise. Other people cope in different ways. It’s pretty common for survivors of The Horrors to become alcoholics; to turn to drugs; or, yes, to die by suicide. 

Which is part of the point of this podcast. Yes, final girls are badass. Yes, we’ve fought harder than most people can even conceive of. But. We. Are. Tired. And if you’ve been through a final girl’s level of horror and you’re still alive, please take a moment to appreciate just how hard that has been and congratulate yourself on still being here. Most people won’t ever understand how remarkable that is, and how many final girls, like Sarah, ultimately don’t survive. 

The Descent was directed by Neil Marshall and came out in 2005. The Descent Part 2 was directed by Jon Harris and came out in 2009. Our final girl Sarah was played iconically by Shauna Macdonald. 

You can follow the podcast on Instagram at that final girl life, or support us on patreon dot com slash that final girl life. The free tier gets you two episodes per month, the paid tier gets you four. 

If you have any suggestions for future episodes, you can email them to that final girl life at gmail dot com.

Thank you for listening. And until next time, remember: the horrors persist… but so do we. 

Resources used:

Articles

US National Library of Medicine: Domestic Violence

Novara Media: 'US police are using AI surveillance cameras to stalk partners and exes'

Sky News: ''Urgent' probe into patient data access after 40 staff opened files on boy attacked by crocodile'

The Telegraph: 'Police officer asked for sex video of female suspect "to show the lads"'

The Guardian: ''Demand has increased, without a doubt': The shocking rise of personal protection dogs'

Studies

Alfandari, Taylor & Scott (2024) 'Risk factors for violence in adult heterosexual noncasual relationships: An overview of reviews' Trauma, Violence & Abuse 27(1)

Fereidooni, Daniels & Lommen (2023) 'Childhood maltreatment and revictimization: A systematic literature review' Trauma, Violence & Abuse 25(1)

Keliholtz, Spencer & Stith (2022) 'Common life stressors as risk markers for intimate partner violence: A meta-analysis' Contemporary Family Therapy 45:349-359

Spencer, Stith & Cafferky (2019) 'Risk markers for physical intimate partner violence victimization: A meta-analysis' Aggression and Violence Behaviour 44:8-17

Testa, VanZile-Tamsen & Livingston (2007) 'Prospective prediction of women's sexual victimization by intimate and nonintimate male partners' Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 75(1):52-60

Thorsander (2022) 'Victim Company: The relationship between women and dogs in intimate partner violence situations' Master's thesis in Sociology, submitted to the University of Gothenberg. Available online.

Zhang et al. (2025) 'Childhood maltreatment and its long-term psychosocial outcomes: An umbrella review of meta-analyses' Trauma, Violence & Abuse 0(0):OnlineFirst

About That Final Girl Life:

You can keep up with the podcast on Patreon, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the pod on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife, or email [email protected] if you want to say hello.

Script:

Haters and gentlefriends, hello and welcome to That Final Girl Life. It’s your new favourite final girl here, taking you through The Horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends. 

I can’t believe I need to say this, but apparently it’s a whole thing now: I am an actual real live human being, not an AI. I physically write all my scripts. I watch the movies at least twice before I do an episode on them. Any resources I use, like other people’s articles which I’ve found helpful, will be in the show notes. 

In this episode we’ll be discussing the incredibly tense psychological sci-fi horror, The Invisible Man, and its badass final girl, Cecilia. Please be aware that there will be spoilers throughout the episode. If you haven’t seen The Invisible Man and you don’t want to know what happens before you do, this is your warning. I found the opening scene much less impactful watching it the second time when I knew what was going to happen, so I’d recommend watching it before listening. 

In this episode I’ll be talking about domestic violence, people not believing victims, psychosis, misogyny, the fear of going mad, and of course, PTSD.

Ready? Settle down somewhere cozy and don’t forget to surround yourself with coffee grounds, flour or paint so you can check you’re definitely alone while we’re discussing… 

The Invisible Man. 

Yesterday, upon the stair, 

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today, 

I wish, I wish, he’d go away! 

This is Antigonish by Hughes Mearns, written in 1899 about a ghost haunting the stairwell of a house in Nova Scotia. Before I knew it was a ghost poem, I assumed it was about trauma: how the people from our past can haunt us even though they’re no longer physically present. I suppose that’s kind of what a ghost is. 

Antigonish sums up a lot of the plot of The Invisible Man; certainly the first half before the audience comes to realise what is actually going on. Watching it for the second time in preparation for this podcast, I found I had to cast my mind back to my first watch, trying to remember how it had felt, because it’s very much a movie that relies on building tension in a can’t-quite-tell-what’s-happening sort of way. 

The film opens with a view of a house on a cliffside near the ocean. It’s beautiful and haunting before we even get inside. But then we see the bedroom, and the tension immediately rockets up. Our final girl Cecilia, played by Elizabeth Moss, a person endowed with brilliant acting skills and questionable politics, is lying awake in bed next to a man. She proceeds to get up, go downstairs, get dressed and leave the house, saying goodbye to her dog Zeus on the way. So far, so normal, right? 

Oh, but it isn’t. I felt this scene right down in my core. If you’ve lived in a physically abusive household you will experience that abject terror you feel any time you try to do something that might get you killed. The way she moves through the house, the way she looks at her phone, the spike of fear when the car alarm goes off… honestly, if you know what that feels like in real life, you might find you don’t seem to be breathing by the end of the scene. 

So we’re immediately set up with the concept that Cecilia is running from her abusive husband, a theory that gets confirmed when she jumps in her sister’s car – a ride she has obviously pre-arranged – and her husband bursts from the trees and rages at the window, screaming and banging it so hard that it breaks. 

Cecilia gets away. She’s still pretty shaken. So are we. 

She goes to stay with her friend James, who happens to be a police officer, which in this instance is probably not a bad shout. James is a single father to his adorable teenage daughter Sidney, who wants to go to fashion school. 

We see that Cecilia is terrified to go outside. Even though her husband doesn’t know James, she’s scared he’ll find out where she’s staying. But James gradually coaxes her to get as far as the end of the driveway before she races back indoors, gasping for breath. 

Then her sister Emily turns up with some shocking news: Adrian, Cecilia’s abusive husband, is died. He has died by suicide in his beautiful mansion and has left her five million dollars, subject to her not committing any crimes and remaining of sound mind. The will’s executor is Adrian’s brother Tom, who isn’t the warmest person by any means, but seems to be somewhat on Cecilia’s side. Adrian was a brilliant inventor specialising in optics, and he had a lot of money, some of which is now offered to Cecilia. 

Cecilia accepts the money – who wouldn’t – and life goes on. She creates a college fund for Sidney, who is over the moon. But Cecilia is still feeling ill at ease. This makes sense: she’s been through a horrible time with her husband, and now he’s died, hinting that her leaving is the reason for his suicide. Even though she knows he’s dead, it’s hard for Cecilia to shake the feeling that he’s still watching her. 

This is the brilliance of this film. It could end up going any number of different ways. I remember the first time I watched it, getting to this point and thinking that I wasn’t sure if this was a descent into madness story, a ghost story, or something else entirely. I try to go into films knowing as little about them as possible, because I like my reactions to be entirely my own. It’s been hellish not being able to get to the cinema to see Obsession or Backrooms this year, because avoiding spoilers is SO HARD. 

But back to Cecilia. 

In the middle of the night we see her sleeping, and then the duvet being rapidly pulled off her. We see flashes of light, as if from a camera. Cecilia wakes up and stares at a scary shadowy figure at the end of the bed, which we soon learn is just a mannequin for Sidney’s fashion projects. Cecilia gets out of bed and finds the duvet on the floor. Picking it up, she stares at an armchair as if she believes someone is sitting in it. She throws the duvet over the chair, but it settles normally, and we can see her berate herself internally for being afraid of nothing at all. She picks up the end of the duvet and pulls it back to bed with her… except that it stops. It’s caught on… nothing. But there are visible depressions in the duvet on the floor where we can see someone’s footprints. In other words, someone invisible seems to be standing on the duvet. Cecilia screams. Sidney, who had been sleeping in bed beside her, wakes up. James rushes into the room, turns on the light, and checks the whole house. No one is there. 

“Adrian will haunt you if you let him,” he tells Cecilia. “Don’t let him.” 

The next day her job interview is ruined when she opens her portfolio and discovers it is empty. This, combined with the events of last night, freaks her out so much that she passes out in front of the interviewer. A trip to hospital and some blood tests reveal that Cecilia had a large amount of diazepam in her system, which is confusing because she doesn’t take them. Later on, Cecilia learns that this isn’t the only surprise: Adrian had also tampered with her birth control and managed to get her pregnant. No wonder he’s so desperate to get her back under his control: she is carrying his child. 

We cut to a scene in a boardroom. Cecilia and James sit on one side of the table, Adrian’s brother Tom on the other. James evidently doesn’t know why Cecilia wanted to talk to Tom, but he’s there for moral support regardless. As Cecilia begins talking, though, James looks more and more concerned. Cecilia is telling Tom that Adrian has found a way to make himself invisible and is stalking her. Tom, in a first proper moment of apparent empathy, tells Cecilia that Adrian was controlling and awful to him as well. He was relieved by his brother’s death, he admits to her. Echoing James’ earlier sentiment, he tells Cecilia not to let Adrian win by bringing him back to life. 

Increasingly desperate for someone to believe her, Cecilia goes to see her sister Emily. But Emily won’t let her in. She’s furious with Cecilia because of the email she received from her that morning, calling her ‘suffocating’ and cutting her off. Cecilia desperately tries to explain that it was Adrian who sent the email, but Emily closes the door in her face, telling her to go get psychiatric help. 

Disbelieved by everyone, Cecilia curls up in the foetal position once she’s back in James’ house and cries in abject despair. She has nowhere left to turn, she feels, and no one will believe her. Sidney finds her and suggests a girls’ night in to cheer her up. Cecilia smiles, but as she goes to stand up, Sidney is hit – hard – by a blow to the side of her head and knocked to the ground. James races in to see what is going on, at which point Sidney says Cecilia hit her, and Cecilia says it was Adrian. We can see James regretting his decision to bring this mad woman into his house. He tells her she has to go, but in the meantime, he and Sidney leave the house. 

Cecilia, left alone with only the invisible Adrian still there, sits against a wall holding a large kitchen knife. She’s spilled coffee grounds all around her so that she will know if Adrian comes towards her. After a while she has an idea, and calls his phone. It rings above her head. That classic horror film location, second only to the basement: it’s in the attic. 

Cecilia goes up there, where she finds the phone along with a set of keys, photos of her and Sidney asleep in bed, and her portfolio which was missing when she went to the interview. The phone buzzes: ‘SURPRISE’ it says. Racing back to the hatch, she throws white paint in front of her and Adrian’s outline appears in the hole. 

This was the moment, watching it the first time, when I realised she was telling the truth. I suppose we could still have been seeing a hallucination, but the next scene confirmed that Adrian was actually there, because he beats her up in the kitchen. 

Elizabeth Moss (and presumably also her stunt double) does some fantastic acting in this scene. She manages to get away and asks Emily to meet her in a restaurant. She wants to speak somewhere public, she says. Emily agrees. 

This was, for me, the most shocking scene in the entire movie. Cecilia is visibly not OK; Emily is visibly stressed but willing to hear her out. Just as Cecilia is about to tell her what Adrian is doing – she has learned that he’s built an invisibility suit and is wearing it to attack her – a knife floats next to Cecilia then swiftly races across to Emily, slitting her throat, and then ends up in Cecilia’s hand almost before we know what’s happened. 

Obviously, everyone in the restaurant thinks she’s killed her sister. What’s the alternative? An invisible man did it and framed you? 

Of course the police are called, and they take her to a secure mental facility, aka a psych ward. She tries to tell them that Adrian is still in the room with them. Predictably, they don’t believe her. 

Eventually she manages to escape, but Adrian is close behind her, killing baffled security staff as he goes. Cecilia steals a car and races to James’ house, which Adrian has beaten her to, and has attacked both Sidney and James. 

Cecilia saves the day by spraying a fire extinguisher to illuminate Adrian and then shooting him several times. But when she and James peel off the mask, they find it is Tom behind it.

This of course makes James, along with pretty much everyone else, believe that Tom was the invisible man the whole time. But Cecilia knows better. 

She calls Adrian, who has been found alive, tied up in his basement apparently by Tom. He wants her back, he tells her, and so she suggests dinner. 

Cecilia goes to Adrian’s house and asks him to just admit to her what he has done. Adrian refuses. Cecilia, of course, is wearing a wire, on the other end of which sits James in a car nearby. 

Saying she’s going to freshen up, Cecilia leaves the room. A few minutes later we see Adrian slit his own throat, still sitting at the dinner table. His arm moves jerkily, as if he’s not in full control. Moments after that, Cecilia enters the room and begins crying and screaming. She dials 911 and tells them Adrian has killed himself. 

James leaves the car and races towards the house, running into Cecilia on the way. She smiles as she tells him that it’s all OK now. Glancing into her bag, we see along with James the invisibility suit she has taken from the house. 

Well, she’s survived. And she has, as they say, “neutralised” the threat herself, so she knows he’s not coming back. She’s been vindicated. The good thing about this, other than that she’s no longer in danger, is that she knows she can trust herself and her instincts. The bad thing is that she’s been repeatedly taught, via this experience, that she can’t trust anyone else, even people who genuinely have her best interests at heart, like James. She’s also learned that she’s no one’s top priority; she might have been Emily’s, if they’d been able to mend that relationship, but Emily is dead. She’s high on James’ list, for sure, but Sidney – completely appropriately – will always come first. 

So she knows she ultimately only has herself to rely on. She has to be her own safety net. 

Luckily, she has a ton of money and an invisibility suit. So we can assume finances aren’t an issue. 

But a lot of other things probably will be. So, where does she end up? 

First we have the question of the pregnancy. It’s not very far along, and I’m pretty sure she’d decide to have an abortion, given that she didn’t want to be pregnant in the first place. 

I think the main things that will continue to haunt Cecilia and have an impact on her life will be to do with her relationships with other people, especially but not exclusively when it comes to romance. This will be familiar to anyone who’s survived a similarly life-threatening relationship: it can be hard to open yourself up in that way again. People will try to be helpful and say things like “It’s OK, they’re not all like that, of course they love you for who you are” and so on, but if they haven’t been in that situation, then they just don’t know what it’s like to try to trust someone again. Not only that, but even the logic of trusting again doesn’t make sense after something like this has happened. 

Cecilia is a smart, strong woman who is more than capable of taking drastic action where necessary, as shown by her actions at the very end of the movie. It’s one of the reasons why The Invisible Man is one of my favourite films: it shows that it doesn’t matter how clever or capable you are, there are times when we can all end up in situations where we are at risk, and societal factors make some of us less believable than others. 

Having said that, there are certain populations who are more likely to end up in abusive relationships than others. These include, among others, people who have been abused as children; people who suffer from depression or PTSD; people with anxious or avoidant attachment styles; and people who don’t have much of a social support network. 

We don’t know much about Cecilia’s background, other than that her relationship with her sister has always been a bit thorny. The fact that she’s ended up in a violent relationship in adulthood points towards some possible abuse in childhood – there are lots of studies linking child abuse with adult revictimization. Interestingly, and counter to what many people expect, this includes all types of abuse pretty much equally, including emotional abuse and neglect, not just sexual or physical abuse. We don’t know whether she suffers from depression, but she will certainly have some post-traumatic stress symptoms after the experiences she’s just had. This is why some people disagree with the ‘D’ in PTSD: it stands for ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ and yet ‘disorder’ seems to imply that it shouldn’t be happening, whereas being traumatised by a traumatic event is… logical. 

Again, we don’t know Cecilia’s original attachment style, but a lot of psychologists these days believe that attachment styles can shift throughout life, with or without direct intervention. Attachment styles refer to how you learned to be in relationships with others when you were very very young; the theory goes that your first ever attachments, probably but not necessarily within your family of origin, will have a lasting impact on how you are in relationships. I always used to hate the attachment theory days in the various psychology and psychotherapy courses I’ve done, because they seemed so fatalistic. But as more research comes out, people are understanding that humans – even adult humans – are more neurologically changeable than we thought, which means there’s arguably more of a chance to change your original way of relating than the people who first came up with attachment theory might have expected. In Cecilia’s case, this might work against her: regardless of her initial attachment style, she’s just come out of a relationship where she absolutely couldn’t trust her partner, and not only that but even the people around her who loved her – Emily, James, Sidney – can’t be trusted to believe her and always have her back, either. 

Which brings us to the social support system: she doesn’t really have one. She has James and Sidney, of course, and I imagine James will be doing everything he can to continue supporting Cecilia. But the events with Adrian will have driven a bit of a wedge between them, and even if this is still a good relationship, it’s probably not one that Cecilia fully trusts. 

The strongest risk factor for intimate partner violence, unfortunately, is previous relationship violence. This includes not just physical violence but also emotional victimization by an intimate partner. Unfortunately, Cecilia has experienced a lot of both. 

Like I said before, Cecilia is smart, and she’s smart in the intellectual sense as well as being intuitive. I can imagine her having heard some of these statistics before, and then looking up things like rates of revictimization, and deciding to stay single. Reading some of the research that’s out there, she might decide that she can still have a fun sex life even without the intimacy part, as long as she stays in control; violence from people you’re not in an ongoing relationship is much more likely to happen if there’s alcohol or drugs involved. Of course this doesn’t mean violence never happens when you’re sober during casual sexual encounters, nor does it excuse perpetrators attacking people who are too drunk or high to either consent or fight back. But it does demonstrate specific risk factors, and I can see Cecilia weighing all of this up in her mind, deciding to stay on her own, but allowing a certain degree of sexual satisfaction into her life, as long as nobody gets too close to her. 

Of course she’ll also have her fantastic guard dog Zeus. Over the last decade there’s been a marked increase in people, especially women, getting dogs for protection. Unfortunately it’s an unregulated industry, and the lack of training a lot of these dogs have, coupled with being bred for aggression or assertiveness, has meant that there’s also been an increase in dog attacks. Zeus, by all accounts, seems to be a wonderful dog, and given that he was presumably bought by Adrian, he’s probably a fully trained guard dog rather than a randomly-acquired pup. 

So Cecilia has her home sorted – she’s rich enough to buy one – her sex life is OK, and she has ongoing companionship in the form of her doberman. 

Unlike our final girl from the previous episode, I reckon Cecilia will probably be doing alright in life overall. She has enough money to tide her over, and let’s not forget the invisibility suit which she can whip out if need be. What a useful thing to have on hand! 

I doubt she’d be satisfied with a life of leisure, and she seemed pretty passionate in her job interview before it all unravelled because of Adrian’s actions. She’s probably joined an architecture firm and negotiated the setup she wants. 

So life’s pretty kushti overall for our final girl, right? 

Sure. But there will still be certain things that might get to her. And this is what makes Cecilia a great example of exactly the kind of final girl I started this podcast to talk about: capable, strong, confident, assertive… but still affected in an ongoing way by her experiences. 

The number one thing it will have affected, probably, is her relationships. We’ve talked a bit about that in terms of sex and romance, and also the specific relationship with her friend James. But friendships and even casual acquaintanceships in general are going to be a challenge too. Let’s recap Cecilia’s relational experiences throughout the course of the film to find out more. 

Cecilia knows exactly how far a controlling man will go to get what he wants. She also understands that people will misuse things they’re working on for their own ends, something a lot of people seem surprised by, which always annoys me. As a survivor of The Horrors, I often find non-perpetrators’ shocked outrage almost as annoying as the acts of the perpetrators themselves, not least because often, victims will try to tell people something is happening to them; people disbelieve them because they don’t think it happens, or don’t believe it happens often, or don’t believe it happens “to people like them,” and then when it comes out that the terrible things have in fact been done, they get to act all shocked and surprised. It drives me fucking insane. 

Some recent examples of this kind of outrage include: 

• a study conducted by the Institute for Justice, a non-profit organisation in the US, which showed that police officers are using tracking technology to stalk current and ex-partners; 

• an NHS probe into the number of presumed unauthorised people accessing the files of the little boy who was attacked by crocodiles recently in a UK zoo; 

• a general investigation by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, showing that police officers frequently misuse their powers for sexual purposes; 

• a police officer attempting to access a sexual video of someone from a live investigation, and I quote, “to show the lads” on WhatsApp. 

And those are just a few examples from the past month. 

Cecilia has learned in the hardest possible way that people will not believe just how bad other people can be. It shatters their idea of upper-middle-class respectability to think that a rich man – a scientist, at that – might go to such lengths to abuse his wife. She’s also experienced people underestimating her lack of safety; even James did this, when the perpetrator was in his own child’s bedroom. Now admittedly, an invisible perpetrator does sound like a stretch, but actually in the context of the world of the movie, it isn’t. And I went to a talk about fifteen years ago in which a physicist spoke about how optics are advancing to be able to create invisibility cloaks, so who knows? They were talking about military uses, naturally, but still; Adrian’s invisibility isn’t completely outside of all possible bounds. 

She’s also been told, over and over again, that she shouldn’t trust her own mind. The great thing about Cecilia, in my opinion, is that she’s never listened to this. Even right at the very end, when James is still unsure whether it was Adrian or Tom who was behind the whole thing, Cecilia backs herself. I love that for her. I just wish it wasn’t necessary. 

Examples of this include James’ statement: “Adrian will haunt you if you let him. Don’t let him.” 

Tom’s statement: “Don’t let him win by bringing him back to life.” 

And Cecilia herself says it, too: “This is what he does. He makes me feel like I’m the crazy one.” 

Even in the final showdown, Adrian is demonstrating this very dynamic when he talks about how she needs him to keep herself together. She cries and goes along with it, because that’s the only option open to you when you’re faced with that level of barefaced controlling narcissism, but even when directly exposed to the cause of her current trauma, she manages to keep that kernel of self-belief which is so necessary if you’re going to survive something like this and thrive later on. 

But even though Cecilia backs herself, and will presumably continue doing so, she’s become used to other people not backing her. She’ll probably become quite closed-off to other people, cagey about all sorts of things, for reasons they won’t understand. I remember, during the only corporate job I had, being constantly teased for my enigmatic responses to the most basic of questions. But they didn’t understand what they were asking. I wrote a song about this once: when someone says “How was your weekend?” but your weekend involved some kind of horrendous retraumatisation event involving reporting a parent for child trafficking whilst simultaneously trying to save them from a drug overdose. Sometimes you just don’t want to go into that. So you lie and say it was fine, but then you get cagey when people press for details. I’ve had colleagues get properly annoyed with me for this. So if you know someone who’s a bit weird about giving details, please bear in mind that it might not just be some weird irritating quirk. They might have some really complicated shit going down which they just can’t bear to talk about, and which isn’t any of your business anyway. 

I can hear you thinking “OK, but what’s the likelihood that Anya from the marketing department is being stalked by an invisible presence, or Spencer in the dev team spent their weekend giving statements to the police about a family member’s drug ring?” 

And that is LITERALLY MY WHOLE POINT: the likelihood is pretty high. Not necessarily of those things specifically, of course, but that something weird is going on, and that that something might be horrific and involve other people and complex relationships? Really high, actually. The number of clients I’ve spoken to who have felt so alone in these kinds of conversations at work indicates to me that there’s probably at least one other person in their respective companies or departments who understands; something I’ve said to them, at times. 

(An amusing example of this from my own life was when I was talking to a new acquaintance at a business dinner, and when she asked “What do your parents do?” I decided I was too exhausted – and, to be honest, slightly too drunk – to lie or be cagey, so instead I just replied with “My dad’s a career criminal and my mother’s in a cult.” To which she, to my amused surprise, replied “omg SAME!” But that’s a story for another time.) 

So. Cecilia’s doing OK, her life is pretty good overall, but relationships are a challenge. Well, OK. We can live with that, right? 

Sure. Will there be other, perhaps less obvious, things that affect her day to day? Almost certainly. 

People talk a lot about ‘triggers’ these days. There are trigger warnings on lots of things: books, films, podcasts; I gave some content notes at the top of this episode, so that people could choose whether or not to engage. However, the meaning of the word ‘trigger’ has changed and softened over time. Originally it was always directly related to post-traumatic stress, and meant something that would trigger a serious psychological or physiological response, such as a flashback, which again is so much more than just remembering a difficult time, but rather a feeling of actually being back there. 

The best way to get people to understand the difference is often by using the example of war trauma. Most people understand, for example, that a soldier who fought in Vietnam and was forever changed by the experience might have a problem if someone unexpectedly let off some random fireworks. We understand that what’s happening is not simply an unpleasant memory surfacing, but an entire embodied reaction. Depending on the person, that may be more or less obvious, but regardless it will have a very real, very lasting impact. 

Of course, like we’ve already been talking about, war isn’t the only source of this kind of life-altering trauma. Living under the constant threat of extreme violence can do that to you, too. So can things like childhood abuse; surviving a natural disaster; sudden and extreme loss. 

A trigger is not something that makes you feel upset or uncomfortable. It is something that provokes an embodied response which returns you to a traumatised state. It is horrible and difficult to avoid, because a lot of the time people’s actual triggers aren’t only the obvious things, like someone looking like they’re about to punch them, but subtle things that were present in the environment at the time, too. 

A way to understand this even if you haven’t experienced this kind of trauma is to think about scent memory. Have you ever been somewhere where you’ve suddenly encountered a particular scent, and it’s taken you straight back to another time in your life? A benign example from my own life is that when I was a teenager, one of my friends always used a particularly fragrant brand of shampoo. A couple of years ago I ran out of my usual shampoo and just grabbed the first thing I saw in the supermarket, which happened to be the same one she used to use. When I put it on my hair in the shower I felt really weird: nice, but weird, because it was like she was suddenly there with me. 

These kinds of evocative memories can be pleasant, like remembering my friend; or sad, if they remind you of a difficult time or of someone who’s died. But they can also be triggers in the literal retraumatising sense, and Cecilia’s recent experience is ripe for those. 

What kinds of things might trigger her? A non-exhaustive list I made during the film includes: 

• sitting with her back to a window 

• heavy rain 

• bending down to pick up something when she’s standing next to her car 

• being locked in anywhere, and/or someone else having keys to her home 

• the specific creak of a floorboard that sounds like the one Adrian stood on in Sidney’s bedroom when he was invisible 

• making breakfast, particularly the same breakfast she was making when Adrian tried to set the kitchen on fire 

• needing to go into the attic for any reason 

• text messages, or a phone buzzing 

• HOSPITALS 

If you look through the script that accompanies this recording, you’ll see that I’ve put that final one in capital letters. HOSPITALS. Because medical trauma is a real thing. 

If you’ve never been inside a psych ward, congratulations. If you have – even as a visitor – you’ll know that on the whole, they’re not happy places. If you have a history of trauma which shows up on your medical record, you unfortunately might also be aware that some doctors will treat you like you’re crazy even if you go to see them for something purely physical. And by “crazy” I mean the societally-understood sense of the word, which includes things like incapable of understanding what’s going on around you, combined with being kind of stupid. Neither of which is actually true of people who have mental health problems; even people who live with episodes of psychosis are often smart, capable human beings a lot of the time. It’s yet another way people draw barriers to make themselves feel safe: by labelling certain people as “crazy” and then defining “crazy” as “less-than,” “non-crazy” people can then tell themselves they’re definitely fine and basically immune to anything bad ever happening. 

Which is bullshit, of course. But it’s very tempting bullshit. 

Cecilia’s psych ward admission will be on her medical file. So will her prior hospital visit in which she was found to have high levels of diazepam in her blood. If she’s particularly unlucky, the person who called her to tell her that might also have noted down that Cecilia seemed unaware of that diazepam. She might have incurred a diagnosis of PTSD, if she’s been seen since surviving the end of the film; or of depression from while she was still with Adrian. 

All of these things can lead to doctors not taking you seriously. 

“But she’s justified!” I hear you cry. “She wasn’t psychotic! It was proven to be an invisible person by the end of the movie!” 

Yeah, I know. But – and I’m speaking from a UK NHS context experience here, but I’d assume it’s similar in the US and elsewhere – when a medic accesses a patient’s chart, they’re not going to read through reams and reams of pages. They’re probably going to look at the bit right at the top, which says something like “Current medications and conditions,” followed by “Significant history.” That’s there to tell them, for example, that this person has a surgical plate in their body and therefore can’t have an MRI scan. But it’s rarely properly up to date, especially in complicated circumstances like Cecilia’s, and that means that someone accessing her file might just see something like: 

Kass, Cecilia 

Depression

PTSD 

History of inpatient psychiatric treatment 

Resistant to treatment 

Recent abortion at 8 weeks 

?Psychosis 

?Delusions

Looking at that, a medical professional might not take Cecilia seriously when she comes in with, for example, symptoms of perimenopause; a weird mark or changing mole on her skin; persistent pain in one or more parts of her body… basically, anything she presents with might now be viewed as “all in her mind” because her trauma history is up front for all to see. 

Of course, she might get a really good doctor who actually takes her seriously, bothers to look at her notes, and sends her for treatment. But even so, it’s probably going to be difficult for her to navigate medical appointments, especially in a hospital setting. 

Having been incarcerated in a psych ward for no good reason, Cecilia might have a pretty strong reaction to having to go into a hospital at all. Plenty of people who have been there for the death of a loved one hate the smell of hospitals and the specific look the rooms and corridors have, let alone people who have been locked up there involuntarily. 

During her psych ward stay, Cecilia was violently restrained by staff and injected with a sedative. She might therefore find it difficult to lie down and relax if she goes for an ECG, where someone looms over you and sticks wires all over your body; or to put her feet in stirrups for a gynae exam, which reduces her control; not to mention the reaction she might suddenly start having to being given injections. 

If you’re interested in how medical and domestic trauma intersect, I talk a lot about it from my own experiences on my Substack, a link to which you can find in the show notes. For now suffice it to say that Cecilia’s medical life is unlikely to be easy, and this might ironically end up working against her even more, in that she’s possibly going to stay away from doctors as much as possible, meaning that by the time she eventually does go to see one, the likelihood of her needing to go to hospital will probably be quite high. 

Overall, though, I’d say our final girl in this movie does OK in life, probably, but with certain caveats. And I’ve completely ignored the fact that the press would be all over this story if they got wind of it, and that would undoubtedly have had all sorts of effects of its own. 

Still, a more positive outcome than last time. But what do you think? 

The Invisible Man was directed by Leigh Whannell and came out in 2020. Our final girl Cecilia was played brilliantly by Elizabeth Moss. 

You can follow the podcast on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife, or send an email to [email protected]. Support us on patreon.com/thatfinalgirllife : the free tier gets you two episodes per month, the paid tier gets you four.

Thank you for listening. And until next time, remember: the horrors persist… but so do we. 

The inspirations I mention at the beginning are:

• The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

• The Final Girls: A Horror Film Podcast by Anna Bogutskaya

• Tell No One by Kendell Kamansky & Annie DeLoach

During the episode I also mention Cariad Lloyd's Griefcast, which is no longer being updated but it has 10 seasons of back episodes to listen to.

Resources used:

I checked the origin of the word 'ardor' using Etymonline.

Find me elsewhere:

You can keep up with the podcast on Patreon, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the pod on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife, or email [email protected] if you want to say hello.

Script:

Hello, and welcome to That Final Girl Life. It’s your new favourite final girl here, taking you through The Horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends. 

I can’t believe I need to say this, but apparently it’s a whole thing now: I am an actual real live human being, not an AI. I physically write all my scripts. I watch the movies at least twice before I do an episode on them. Any resources I use, like other people’s articles which I’ve found helpful, will be in the show notes. 

Now that’s out the way… since this is the first episode, here’s a little bit about me. I call myself an IRL final girl because I have survived many of the horrible things shown in horror films. Somehow, I still enjoy watching them, mostly I think because I find them relatable and therefore oddly comforting. 

I managed to survive a childhood which involved being trafficked in two separate child sex rings whilst also being raised in a cult. Don’t worry, I won’t be talking about that on this podcast, but if you’re interested, I’ll share details of where else you can follow me later on. 

People often congratulate me for surviving and use words like ‘brave’ and ‘inspirational,’ especially now that my disabilities are more visible. And I am proud that I got out and managed to make a pretty good life for myself. But what most people don’t realise about us final girls is that for us, the horrors don’t end along with the initial events. 

I’m trained as a psychotherapist, and specialised in working with people who have survived childhood trauma. I also have a background in academic psychology, and I’m currently doing a PhD in philosophy which is partly about the uncanny and how it’s depicted in horror films. My thesis also looks at how the most difficult things that happen to us can give us interesting and different perspectives on life, something a lot of final girls have in common. 

So I’ll be taking us through a different horror movie in each episode, giving a brief synopsis, and then discussing what life might be like for the final girl from that story after the movie has ended. I’ll be using my training in psychology and psychotherapy, my experience as a therapist, and my research as a student of existential philosophy to inform what I’m saying. And, of course, I’ll be drawing on my own personal experiences, too. 

There won’t be any ads on here because I hate them. Before I begin this first episode, though, I’d like to shout out three things that inspired me to begin… beyond, y’know, my life history. 

I had the idea for this a couple of years ago but I wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested. Then I discovered The Final Girl Support Group, a novel by Grady Hendrix, and I heard it had been popular, so I thought that might mean there could be an audience for this podcast. I really liked the book, I recommend it. 

The Final Girls is a brilliant podcast hosted by film critic Anna Bogutskaya, discussing all horror films, not only those with final girls in. I loved her takes on everything and if you want to listen to someone who actually knows what they’re talking about film-wise, check it out. 

And finally, Tell No One is my favourite podcast of all time. It’s a true crime podcast – no, wait, don’t run away! It’s not awful! – it’s a true crime podcast hosted by bffs Kendell and Annie, who discuss all sorts of cases. The reason I like it is that, whilst they both have a brilliant sense of humour, that humour is never directed at the victims. And as a survivor of some of the things they cover on the show, I’ve found it really moving to listen to them talk about the perpetrators in really scathing ways. It heals something in me every time they call a serial rapist pathetic. So if you’re interested in true crime but you find a lot of the podcasts in that genre to be too insensitive to listen to, give Tell No One a try. I also mentioned to them that I was thinking of starting this podcast and they were really encouraging, which gave me the final push. 

So. Here we are. That’s my initial intro. 

This first episode is airing on the 2026 summer solstice, so of course we’re discussing Ari Aster’s visual masterpiece Midsommar and its flower-adorned final girl, Dani. Please be aware that there will be spoilers throughout the episode. If you haven’t seen Midsommar and you don’t know what happens yet, please watch it before listening to this. There’s one scene in particular that works so much better when it comes as a surprise… 

In this episode I’ll be talking about grief, bereavement by suicide, PTSD, bipolar disorder, mental illness stigma, controlling romantic relationships, cults, gang rape, and drugs. 

Ready? Have a sip of cooling marigold tea and get ready to dance your way into… 

Midsommar. 

We first meet Dani when we are rudely pulled out of a lovely folk song being sung over beautiful images of a frozen landscape by a telephone ringing sharply. We see two people in bed, then cut to Dani, who is worriedly calling her parents for the umpteenth time that evening. She’s had a message from her sister implying that she’s going to kill their parents and then herself. And then: radio silence. Dani is predictably freaked out. 

We then meet Dani’s boyfriend Christian and three of his friends, all of whom will be important to the story. There’s Josh the anthropology PhD student, played by the wonderful William Jackson Harper; Pelle the Swedish dude; and Mark, the resident dickhead. 

We learn that Christian’s friends don’t like Dani, and that he’s been planning to break up with her for a while now. 

Back to some more exposition about Dani’s sister, who has a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. For those unfamiliar, this is a type of recurring depression where people go through periods of having unusually high levels of energy and often engaging in risky or erratic behaviour, followed by periods of very low energy when they often are unable to engage with other people and spend a long time in bed. If you’ve seen people online criticising the use of the term ‘bed rotting,’ it’s because it’s seen as glorifying this latter type of depression. 

Because Dani’s sister has had these problems for a while, people have stopped taking her seriously, and they keep telling Dani not to respond to her sister’s urgent-sounding messages because it might “encourage her.” This is a real thing people say. However, one of the primary indicators that someone will one day die by suicide is if they have spoken about it many times before. Of course that doesn’t mean it’s your responsibility to step in and save them every time. But it does mean Dani is completely justified in her fear of what might happen. 

We get a bit more background on Dani and Christian’s relationship when it comes out that he’s agreed to go to Sweden with his friends for six weeks but hasn’t told her. The argument is interesting because she ends up apologising to him, even though I think most of us would agree that if you’re in a committed relationship, deciding to go away for over a month in two weeks’ time is the sort of thing you might be expected to tell your partner about first. 

Their dynamic, as shown by the argument, is not a healthy one. But the unhealthiness is subtle. Nobody is screaming or hitting anything. But there’s an undertone of everything being Dani’s fault, of her being somehow wrong for having frankly pretty normal needs and requirements of her partner. 

A short while later, Dani receives a phone call telling her that her sister has killed their parents and then herself. Understandably, she breaks down. 

Christian now feels that he can’t break up with her, and ends up inviting her to Sweden. Whilst Mark is very against this idea and Josh isn’t exactly thrilled about it either, Swedish friend Pelle, whose community they are going to visit, seems genuine when he tells her he’s pleased she’ll be coming with them. 

So off they all go to Sweden. It’s a long drive from the airport to the community. On the way, they stop off and take some mushrooms, and Dani has a bad trip during which she falls asleep and dreams about her parents and sister. 

She sleeps for a long time and wakes up the following day, still lying on the grass. Since it’s midsummer in Sweden, the sun has been out the whole time. 

The group walk to meet the community. An elder greets them. He says “welcome” to the boys, but “welcome home” to Dani. 

There are various ceremonial events: gifts, a meal, and so on. Mark is predictably a douchebag about the whole thing. Dani is of course deep in grief but still tries to go along with the customs. 

And then comes… That Scene. 

Oh my god. I watched this in a CINEMA. On a BIG SCREEN. A BIG SCREEN that showed the SPLATS. 

What splats, you ask? 

The splats the two 72-year-olds make when they jump to their death from a clifftop, landing right in front of the crowd of community members, as well as Dani and her group. 

The splats are GLORIOUS, you guys. Awful. Obviously. But SO WELL DONE. The man doesn’t quite die the first time so people have to manually splat him with a sledgehammer. 

Look, if you’re into gore, you will adore this scene. I’m not generally a fan, but Ari Aster can make anything look strangely beautiful. Including, apparently, half a face. 

Dani watches all of these events with a kind of traumatised stare, which I’ll talk about more later on. Other non-community-members around her, however, are reacting very differently: shouting, retching, yelling at the elders that this is disgusting. 

Dani walks off on her own after the ceremony. Understandably, she has been deeply affected by it. Pelle comes to find her and he talks about how he too lost his parents at a young age. He says the community could offer her a home; a family. 

The day after the ceremony, people start disappearing. First Simon, an English bloke who was there as the guest of another community member, and then his girlfriend Connie. Then Mark (good riddance, tbh) and Josh. 

Dani continues going along with the group’s rituals, at times visibly trying to hold herself together but mostly looking kind of numb. She bakes pies with the women, and the following day she is again sent off with the women of the group, but this time she is given some cooling marigold tea to drink, and then the dancing begins. 

Every year, we are helpfully informed by Pelle, a may queen is chosen from among the young women at the midsummer celebration. The may queen is chosen by means of a dance contest, in which all of them begin dancing, and whoever manages to dance the longest wins the title of may queen. 

Of course, Dani wins. Immediately she is surrounded by the community members. “Welcome home,” they tell her, “we love you.” 

The community holds a meal in Dani’s honour. She seems a little dazed – there was definitely something extra in that tea – but nowhere near as dazed as Christian, who can barely find his way to the table. 

An elder tells Dani that it is tradition for the may queen to go and bless the crops. “Can Christian come?” she asks. “Nej,” comes the reply. 

Dani goes and blesses the crops. That seems like quite a nice little ritual, maybe things will be ok now. 

Oh. Oh no. 

When they get back, Dani hears suspicious noises coming from one of the buildings. She goes to investigate, and through a crack in the door she sees Christian having sex with a woman, surrounded by many of the other women in the community. All of them are naked. As the audience, we know that Christian is being gang raped here: he has been drugged, and although he agreed to drink the tea and half-agreed to maybe have sex with Maja, the main girl who’s fucking him, he definitely did NOT sign up for this weird orgiastic ritual. 

Dani, understandably, cries and vomits at the sight of this. 

As the audience, we see Christian at the end of his ceremony frantically running away from the house, still fully naked. He attempts to shelter in a barn, where he finds the flayed body of Simon hanging from the ceiling, butterfly-style. Before he can properly react, he is found by some elders who drug him with some kind of nerve agent, rendering him paralysed. 

Now Dani, adorned in an array of genuinely beautiful flowers, sits in front of the gathered community. They must make offerings, they explain, and some have already been prepared. However, there is one final space to fill. Dani must choose: will Christian be sacrificed, or Torbjorn, a man selected at random from the crowd? 

Dani chooses Christian, who is then sewn into a bearskin. 

We watch as the community takes the sacrifices to a triangular yellow building. They place them against the walls lining the room, apart from Christian, whom they place on a bale of hay in the centre. 

Then they set it alight. 

As the sacrifices start to scream, so do the community members on the outside. Dani walks unsteadily up and down in her giant flower dress, retching and crying. She looks like a huge, beautiful slug.

Finally she stops and turns to look at the yellow triangular house as it burns to the ground. 

As the camera zooms in on her face, she begins to smile. 

So. The movie has ended with Dani standing with the community. What might her life be like now? 

Well, that partly depends on what Dani decides to do. But there’s a bit of a problem with that, which is that Dani isn’t really in a place to make any big decisions. In the space of a month she’s lost her sister to suicide; her mother and father to parricide; and four of her acquaintances to murder by the very people she’s now staying with. She’s taken a lot of drugs, most of which she was unfamiliar with. She’s seen two people die by suicide in front of her, in a particularly gory fashion. And she’s watched as seven people – three alive, four dead – burn down to bone, one of whom is her now ex boyfriend who she personally sent to that fate. I say she’s ‘watched’; she’s also smelled it. You don’t forget the smell of burning human flesh and hair. 

All of which puts her in a place of extreme vulnerability. The likelihood, certainly in the short term at least, is that she stays with the community. Whether we can call this a ‘choice’ or not is up for debate. 

And that is how cults get you. While I was watching Pelle talking to Dani about wanting her to stay; about how he too had lost his parents; about how the community could offer her a home and a family; I had an uncomfortable feeling of familiarity. 

The cult I grew up in was nothing like the one in Midsommar. It was Christian rather than Pagan, and there was no ritual hurling of people off cliffs. However, there were efforts to recruit new members. There was even a weekly meeting in which we learned how to do this. One of the tactics was to look through the obituaries and then put literature through the doors of people whose loved ones had just died. We had booklets called things like “Will I ever see my dead loved ones again?” and “Resurrection: The hope for the future.” They contained invitations to the group’s ceremonies. A few days later, we would knock on their doors to see if they had received these booklets, act surprised when they told us they had recently lost someone, and say something like “It must be God’s will that I visited your house that day.” 

If you have lived in the very depths of grief, you will know just how devastating it is. When you lose someone close, especially if it is sudden or particularly horrific, the world disappears and you are left alone in the thick soup of no-more-them. If, like Dani, you were the only surviving member of your immediate family, then no one around you will properly be able to connect with your grief. And everyone grieves differently anyway; even if Dani had had another sibling, they might not have understood each other’s reactions. 

And life has this way of making things happen all at once. Dani didn’t only lose her family, which would have been awful enough to begin with; she was also in an unhealthy and difficult romantic relationship; and then… well, and then Sweden happened. 

Listening to Cariad Lloyd’s Griefcast a few years ago, I remember someone talking about how they had experienced three or four significant deaths in a row. Some people hadn’t even believed them, they said, and nobody else had known how to react. 

And that’s what happens when you go through the level of horror they could make a movie about. Some people just won’t believe that you’ve experienced what you’ve been through. Others believe it, maybe even were there for part of it, but as the horrors pile on, the people around you step away. 

Unless you’re near a bunch of cult members, who step closer. 

And once Dani had come out of the most acute period of grief – which I imagine would take quite some time, and might be further messed up by the various substances the cult seem to enjoy – she would find herself living in a community which she knows is willing to murder dissenters. And yet they would be being so lovely to her. They will have provided her with food, shelter… home and family, like Pelle offered her in the film. Stepping away from them now, the moment she no longer fully needs them, might feel like a betrayal. 

So Dani’s in the community, she’s been there for a while, but she’s starting to remember that there’s a life outside of all this. Whether this has taken months or years is anyone’s guess. And this assumes that she’s still single; that she hasn’t, for example, given birth to a child. During one of the meals in the film, a community member explains to Dani that the children are raised communally. If she does have a child, then leaving the community will be even harder, and might well mean leaving that child behind. 

Given the amount of sex that happens just during the nine days when the friends are there, I think it’s safe to assume that a child is likely. Let’s just give her the one baby, as a conservative estimate. 

Pregnancy, of course, brings its own challenges both physically and mentally. Probably this will compound Dani’s grief, reopening the wound of her losses and bringing to the surface any grief she thinks she’s already dealt with. The idea of becoming a parent often reminds people of their own parents; working with people who have been inadequately or abusively parented, I am always struck by how much pregnancy can bring up. Whilst we know nothing about how she was parented, certainly she will be thinking about her parents – probably especially her mother – during this time. We knew next to nothing about the sister, either, but as far as we could tell she had no children, so if her parents had still been alive, Dani’s baby would have been their first grandchild. 

All of this means that any healing Dani had already managed to do might slip backwards during her pregnancy. 

The pregnancy or birth, however, might spark a little rebellion in Dani. There’s nothing like realising you’re responsible for a tiny, helpless being to make you try to fix things. Perhaps she tries to run. The cult wouldn’t like that; and given her physical condition, as well as her desperation, she’s unlikely to succeed. 

So now Dani is stuck with the cult and a baby. And the cult members are not best pleased with her. She feels watched. 

Some time passes. How long will depend on all sorts of factors: Dani’s physical and mental health, how much access she has to her child, how much of a hold the cult has on her, and so on. 

Probably at some point, people will come looking for Christian, Josh and Mark. But cults are very good at keeping things covered up, and at exercising their religious rights in ways that allow them to conduct all sorts of awful activities that should get the whole lot of them thrown in prison. 

So back in the US, the three boy students are listed as missing. An assumption is probably made that some kind of accident happened; perhaps the cult even staged this. If so, they’re likely to have staged Dani’s death as well; and without any family to look for her, who’s going to bother? 

But our girl does have some backbone. She’s been through a lot and she’s still alive, after all. To date, her main defence has been intense dissociation: we can see that through the trauma stare she does in the cliff jump scene. The world warps around her and she can barely hear what is going on; simultaneously, she’s gripped by the awfulness she’s watching in front of her. 

Dissociation can be useful, but it can also lead us to stay in a situation that’s not good for us. Dissociation basically means being cut off from yourself, and it can take many different forms. If you’ve ever done anything difficult where you’ve gone “Just get through it, don’t think about what it feels like,” you’ve dissociated. It can be really helpful, for example if you’re running a marathon or dealing with an emergency. But in day-to-day situations it can lead to a lack of control over your own life, which is where Dani has now found herself. 

Speaking of dissociation, however, this might help Dani to get out and back to the US. Unfortunately, give the child-rearing style of the community, she’s probably going to have to leave her kid behind in order to do that. But given that she’s already watched her boyfriend be burned alive at her own command, I reckon she’s probably got it in her to ignore any feelings she might have about needing to run away without her child. She’d probably justify it to herself by telling herself she’d come back for them one day, although once she’s back in her old life I feel it’s more likely that she’d simply switch off those feelings and try to forget about the kid. 

Presumably her way back home will involve some kind of hitchhiking to the US embassy, and then some challenging conversations about where she’s been and where her friends are. We already know that Dani has a tendency to take the blame even when things aren’t her fault, and I can imagine her falling into a ‘fawning’ response to the people looking into her case and repeatedly apologising for the inconvenience, and probably crying a lot. 

This is interesting given that she’s been so dissociated for so long. But let’s remember that whilst in the cult, she’s rarely been directly challenged. Mostly she’s just been required to be docile and go along with things. And, of course, there are the various substances she’s ingested, which she’s probably had to try to decrease to give herself a chance of getting out. So by the time she arrives at the embassy, she’d be feeling very weird. 

Let’s say the embassy visit goes as smoothly as possible and they arrange Dani’s safe passage back to the US and allow her to move back into her parents’ house. She is, after all, a beautiful young white woman, so although she’s had a truly horrific time, there are certain barriers she won’t have to face on the way back home. 

So she’s back in the US, living in her parents’ old home. What does her life look like now? 

There isn’t really any discussion of their financial setup in the film, but Dani’s parents seem neither poor nor super rich. I’d imagine she’d have at least a little inheritance to tide her over, and let’s assume the mortgage has been paid off, just to make things easier for our final girl. 

Even given this leg-up, it might be difficult for her to manage. Let’s remember that she was still young when she ended up in the cult, and that at the time she was in the middle of finishing her thesis, which means she’d probably spent most of her life up to that point having someone else do a lot of the financial management of life for her. Stepping out of the bright Swedish sunshiney weirdness and back into her old Minnesotan life is bound to have some weird aftereffects. Interestingly, Minnesota apparently has the highest percentage of Swedish people living in the US, which maybe explains why the cult are so taken with Dani, and why the elder at the beginning says “welcome home.” 

Dani’s surname is Ardor, another clue that there is something predetermined about the events of the movie. Ardor describes a feeling of passion or ongoing excitement, but it comes from a word meaning ‘to burn’; the passion it describes is hot and filed with desire. It seems like no coincidence then that Dani’s boyfriend burns up in front of her while she smiles at the excitement she has perhaps found in the discovery of her fucked-up little cult family. 

Cults are great at making you feel at home in general, and even more so if you have some kind of historic relationship to them. Now that she’s back in Minnesota, in an empty house which is undoubtedly bringing up all her grief about her family again, she is probably second-guessing her decision to return. Does this even feel like home anymore? Probably not. Her friends might have thrown some kind of ill-fated welcome home party, but that will have been too much for Dani, who we know was already prone to anxiety and crying meltdowns before she even got to Sweden. Her old friends, even those who try to stick around for a while, will probably ultimately back away from the drama and leave her even more isolated. Understandable, but not great for our girl. 

In amongst all of this, she’ll be being questioned by the police about what the hell happened and where the others are. This will be bringing up all sorts of trauma responses and, given her lack of any support system and general fragility, she’s unlikely to be dealing with this robustly. Having someone asking you anything about your deepest traumas is difficult enough even if you’ve signed up for it, as anyone with PTSD who’s been through therapy will know. Having law enforcement agents repeatedly interrogate you about it can’t be easy at all. The only thing that might give her some degree of relief in this situation is her privilege: given that she’s young, white and pretty, some of the officers might be swayed to treat her more favourably because they’ve objectified her as some kind of sexy distressed waif. This comes with its own problems, however, not least the fact that she’s just escaped from a cult which is very obsessed with sex. That sort of thing often – NOT ALWAYS! – but often results in one of two possibilities: being turned off sex for ages, or becoming hypersexualised. I’m not sure Dani would fit into either of these perfectly, which makes sense because people aren’t data, but I can imagine her now-ingrained passivity might mean she ends up in situations that do her harm. I mean, just look at where she ended up when she went on holiday to Sweden. 

All of the things we’ve just spoken about will render Dani susceptible to pretty much anyone who wants to offer her the things she so sorely lacks: a feeling of belonging, of family, of homeliness. She has a house, of course, and I reckon she’d just stay living there rather than sell it and relocate; but she’s been isolated by death and trauma from the people she was once close to, and her time in the cult has made her forget how to interact normally with other humans. Not necessarily forget in the literal memory sense, but forget in the embodied sense of how to hold yourself, who speaks when, etc., which is governed by all kinds of strange social norms. 

Those norms can be difficult enough to navigate at the best of times, and this isn’t the best of times for Dani. In the cult, contravening social rules meant punishment, sometimes by death, and so whenever she does accidentally step on a toe, she probably ruminates and feels terrible about it for ages afterwards. 

What happens ultimately to Dani will of course depend on all sorts of things. Does Pelle come and try to find her? What about the elders? Does she willingly return to the cult, in the way so many people do, because it’s the closest thing to comfort she can find? 

Perhaps. If none of those things happen, then in my opinion Dani would be ripe for any kind of weird alternative bullshit that comes her way. Probably the first dodgy yoga-juice-cleanse-anti-vaxxer who shows up will be someone she’ll imprint on in relief, and follow them into the madness. Given her proclivity for going along with rituals she could end up in any kind of group, although I’d imagine she’d be most likely to go for something with pseudo-natural vibes, communal life, and vague but persistent spirituality. 

So: our girl leaves one cult, can’t cope with life, and joins another. Bleak? Yeah. Realistic? Also yeah. Is it possible her life could go another way? Sure. People escape terrible situations and build better lives all the time. But this is how I see Dani’s life most likely playing out given her history and the way she tends to respond to trauma. 

What do you think? 

Midsommar was directed by Ari Aster and came out in 2019. Our final girl Dani was played beautifully by Florence Pugh. 

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Thank you for listening. And until next time, remember: the horrors persist… but so do we.