This Psychological Horror Shows the Final Girl’s Fate After the Credits:

Ask any horror lover their favorite final girl, and they’ll be able to give you an answer without hesitation. Maybe it’s Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) from the Scream franchise, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) from A Nightmare on Elm Street, or Sally (Marilyn Burns) from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Whomever she is, she is loved, respected, and defended by fans. The final girl is a beloved trope in horror movies. She’s the total badass whosurvives everything a slasher or killer throws at her and walks away bloody, but victorious. She wins, but at what cost? What actually happens to the final girls after they survive the unthinkable? That’s an angle we rarely see, which is exactly why Olivia West Lloyd created Somewhere Quiet.

Taking place after she survives being kidnapped, Meg (Jennifer Kim) is forced to return to her life in Somewhere Quiet. To help her decompress, her husband, Scott (Kentucker Audley), takes her to his family’s residence on Cape Cod. A trip that’s supposed to be peaceful and serene turns into quite a nightmare for Meg as she slips into madness and paranoia at everything around her. Scott’s cousin, Madelin (Marin Ireland), shows up, and things get a little weird. Madelin and Scott’s relationship seems deeper than just cousins, and their family history points to potential foul play. Meg is determined to get out of Cape Cod and return home, but they’re urging her to stay at every turn. Is Meg justified in how paranoid she feels, or is the trauma of what she survived slowly eating away at her?

Your standard final girl will fight their enemy and walk away victorious. It’s often dramatic and drawn out; sometimes, you even suspect the girl might not make it. But of course, the killer trips, or she finds a weapon, and she can weasel her way out of the clutches of death. In Somewhere Quiet, we don’t even really get a glimpse of what happened to Meg. The beginning starts with a tense, attention-grabbing scene where we see her limping down a road with a shotgun in tow. She steals a vehicle from a man and drives away screaming. From here, we fast-forward to Meg helping Scott pack up the car to take a nice little vacation away from the hustle and bustle of Boston. So, none of what Meg went through while being kidnapped is shown with zero idea of her trauma and what she needed to do to survive. No one knows why she was kidnapped, where she was taken, nor what was done to her, leaving a lingering mystery in the air.

Somewhere Quiet is a slow burn that analyzes messy, big feelings a traumatized final girl would likely be experiencing. This already subverts the Final Girl trope by focusing on “what happens to the final girl next?” Lloyd uses her script to show an array of feelings that pretty loudly show the dichotomy of human experience. For instance, Meg finds a lot of very questionable religious items in the home that appear really insidious. During one scene, she finds a plate that says “Prepare To Meet Thy God”. Based on Meg’s recent experiences with being kidnapped, it can feel like a deadly sign of what’s to come for her, because she’s already on edge. For Scott’s family, it could just be homage to their deep-rooted devotion to their religion. Meg is on edge, and rightfully so, so every interaction is dissected.

The way the film is set up makes you question everything. Meg keeps seeing an elderly woman that no one else seems to see. Is this a response to the PTSD she acquired from her kidnapping? As a viewer, you’ll often find yourself asking if Scott is emotionally manipulating her or if Meg is seeing things and taking moments out of context. There’s sympathy shown from various characters in the film for what she endured, but it also often feels like she isn’t believed in how terrible it was or that she should get over what happened to her. You can’t help but to feel incredibly uncomfortable for Meg and want to crawl out of your skin during a few scenes.

According to Bloody Disgusting, Lloyd wrote the script for Somewhere Quiet after she watched a brutal horror film. The film ends with the girl waiting to be picked up by police after all of her friends were dead, and she can’t help but wonder what happens to her next. Lloyd states that initially, friends and family will smother her and hover over her, but eventually, they will return to their routines and normal lives. However, the final girl won’t because her present is forever changed by what she experienced during her almost dying days. Instead of filling the movie with jump scares that could also echo Meg’s PTSD, Lloyd built tension throughout the entire film with increasingly dramatic and eerie moments.

As the camera lingers and focuses in on facial expressions and reactions, audiences have a chance to gather their own information on what is going on with Meg and the cousinly love duo. Somewhere Quiet acts as somewhat of a palate cleanser for the final girl fighting for her life. Instead of choking down moments of terror between jump scares and severed limbs, you are asked to slowly savor and digest the account of someone who has been irrevocably changed after tragedy.

What Other Instances Do We Get a Glimpse of Post-Final Girl Life?

While we don’t get deep-diving glances into life post-survival like Somewhere Quiet, there are multiple films that attempt to show the adjustment a final girl must make after surviving. In Scream (2022), the viewers get a chance at seeing Sidney Prescott existing in her day-to-day life as she is alerted that Ghostface is back. She’s enjoying a run with her children when she receives a call from Dewey to tell her the news. One line from Sidney reveals that struggle that any final girl would deal with, and that is when she tells Dewey (David Arquette) “I’m Sidney Prescott, of course I have a gun”. The paranoia and fear that she will be attacked again is very real and very present, even if there is no imminent danger. Yellowjackets is another TV show that comes to mind to show life after survival. The all-girls soccer team that survives in the wilderness by essentially turning against each other and partaking in cannibalistic acts will never be the same when they make it back home. Yellowjackets reveals how each girl that survived copes with the trauma of killing and eating their friends to survive and how unhinged the mind can become with trauma.

Somewhere Quiet erupts at the beginning, simmers down, then comes to a rolling boil before the end credits roll. Lloyd’s film will have you dismembering every psychological aspect of your favorite final girl to try and understand how life will be for her in the future.

Somewhere Quiet is currently showing in theaters in the U.S.

View this article at Collider.