Episode Transcript
Birds are chirping and Harper is standing in her kitchen with a bloody nose. Blood is on her face and the back of her hand. It is raining while the sun is out, and if you know me at all, you know I am irrationally terrified of that nature phenomenon. The rain is an orange/red color. A man falls from the sky and we cut to a field of dandelions. Harper is on her way to a beautiful, giant house on the English countryside. Upon her arrival, she grabs a juicy green apple from a tree and chomps right into it. my kind of woman.
She is greeted by a man named Geoffrey who tells her some boring shit about the house no one cares about and goes to grab her bags for her from her car while she gets herself a cup of tea. I quite like Geoffrey’s electric kettle, baby blue and large. After he has brought in her bags, he tries to joke with her about how she cant eat the apples because they are the forbidden fruit. When she apologizes, he explains he was only joking and that he actually doesn’t care at all how many she eats because they fall to the ground and spoil anyway. He then gives Harper a tour of the house, making sure to tell her to not flush her tampons because they have a septic tank and that there is a great pub in a super close village that is a 10 minute walk there and a 30 minute walk home. he asks her where her husband is and she explains that she hasn’t had a chance to change her Mrs to Ms and her last name back to what it was originally. Lucky for Harper, Geoffrey lives just up the road in case she needs anything.
That afternoon, Harper facetimes with her noticeably American friend and explains that Geoffrey asked her husband, James. She implied to him that she was divorced and tells her friend that this kind of thing is going to keep happening and she will just have to get used to people assuming she is married and has a husband. She has a quick memory she shares with us about James falling from the sky and her screaming at him through the sliding glass door. We then get a less than lovely memory of her and James having a discussion about their divorce and when Harper doesn’t agree to back down from her divorce wishes, James tells her that he is just going to kill himself just so she will have to live the rest of her life knowing that she is the reason he is dead. And she tells him that this very threat is the exact reason that they do have to get divorced – because his life decision to end it all has nothing to do with her.
She then goes on a nice walk through the woods when it starts to rain and she slows down to enjoy its cleansing properties. She approaches a long tunnel that she finds appropriate of doing some vocal exercises in to listen to her own echoes. Harper does this for far longer than I think I or anyone else would enjoy and made me really confused about how sound travels in tunnels when her echoes echoed off of each other. ¾ of the way through the tunnel, another person appears on the other end and starts to run after her. But really slowly, kind of like a zombie. It has a peculiar screeching sound that it makes when it gets close to her, but it never gets close enough for us to see it. Eventually she runs to very end of what I would consider a very deep creek because again, I went to TX public school and have no idea what these types of things are called. It has a wall and a small door, but Harper opts to climb up a very steep hill to get back up to where she is staying, using trees and branches to get her up the dirt wall.
When she gets to the top, she finds a really old and visibly abandoned house. She hears a twig snap and walks to jump over a fence. She thinks that she may have been paranoid, so she gets her phone out to take a photo of the old house and as soon as she puts the phone away, a very very naked man is staring at her. She walks away quickly and we as the audience get to see how she found James when he jumped off of the building. His hand was pierced on a sharp fence, his foot had been split off. Talk about absolute trauma. In the bathtub before bed, she looks at the photo of the abandoned house she sent her friend and notices that the naked man is in the photo if you zoom in closely.
The next morning, she gets up and gets ready for the day. She told Geoffrey she could not play the piano, but she sits down and immediately cranks out Chopin’s Nocturne 9 like its nothing. While she plays, the still lake begins to move and the sun begins to cover more ground. She abruptly stops and makes herself a grapefruit. She sits down to do some work and talks to a colleague. She has no idea, but the naked man has found his way to her house and is peaking in through the windows. She gets a facetime call from her friend Reilly and the man just stands at the window and watches her. Most of the house is just windows. In the tour of the living room, she sees the naked man in the front yard looking to grab an apple. She calls the police and they ask her some questions like address and what have you. She then notices that the front door is unlocked and cracked open. After she sees his shadow pass by, she runs to the door and slams it shut and locks it.
She has a memory of the day that James killed himself. He was angry, throwing his bedside table around the bedroom. Harper was texting Reilly in the kitchen. She said “he is really scaring me”. So like any man would do, James sees this as a prime opportunity to tell Harper that, even though he is throwing furniture around and has already promised to kill himself, she is the one that is actually scaring him. Her phone screen locks and when she doesn’t want to open so James can see “what you told that bitch Reilly”, he hits her in the nose so hard with her phone that she falls flat on her back. The police catch the man and the police officer tells her that what she was walking on the day before was actually an old railway line. The officer tells her that the man seems to be harmless but that he smells like ass and has clearly been sleeping outside.
Harper phones Reilly to tell her about it and she goes to a church nearby on a walk. At the church, she recounts what she did after James hit her. She asks him if that was his plan to win her back, which he tries to vehemently apologize for. She literally pushes him out of the apartment, telling him that it doesn’t matter if he kills himself or not because either way he will never see her again. She screams inside the church. The vicar notices, but does not approach her. As she leaves the church, there is a man in a grey suit wearing a caricature of a woman mask. He asks Harper if she wants to play hide and seek, and she politely tells him no, that she does not want to. The vicar comes out to her defense and tells Samuel that she is not going to play with him. It is at this point that I finally realize that there has not been a single woman other than Harper in this village. Samuel tells her and the vicar to fuck off and cannot resist leaving without telling her that she is a stupid bitch.
The vicar explains that he heard her screaming inside and makes himself available to talk to her. She tells him everything that happened and says that she cannot decide whether or not James went to the flat above theirs to climb from that balcony down to theirs and slipped, or if he simply let go to kill himself. For some reason, this requires the vicar to put his hand on her knee. I didn’t know that confiding in someone you don’t know meant you consented to being touched as well. The vicar tells Harper that her screaming had to have been the reason why James did this to himself and makes sure to ask her if she allowed him to apologize after he hit her. The vicar tells her that “Men do strike women sometimes.” He also tells her that if she had given him the chance to apologize, he would still be alive. She tells him to fuck off and leaves him on his stupid bench that was bought tax free because fuck churches.
After she leaves, get a scene of Harper’s echoed singing with a dead deer in the forest. We travel through the empty eye socket of the deer to see the statue Harper was admiring in the church with the naked man cutting his forehead open to shove a small leaf in the slit while staring at the statue. We pan back out of the eye socket to find the deer decaying rapidly, covered in maggots.
At the random pub that Geoffrey recommended, Harper shows up to find him and two other men. Harper orders a drink and Geoffrey fights with her to make sure she doesn’t pay for her own drink because apparently that would be considered a hate crime. While she stands at the bar, one of the men at the table seated together stares at her with complete and utter hatred. At the bar, Geoffrey tries to talk to her but she literally does not care to listen. In walks mister policeman that came to her house and asks her if she is doing alright. Geoffrey had no idea anything at all had happened, so the officer explains to Geoffrey what happened and that they had to release the naked man a few hours prior because they didn’t really have anything to charge him with. Harper explains that he had been stalking her and the officer tells her that just because she saw the man twice after he followed her out of the woods does not mean that she was being stalked. He even tries to tell her that just because she saw him, does not mean that he saw her. She leaves, understandably upset.
On her walk back to her rental, she walks by the cemetary at the church. She hears the screech of the naked man but does not see him. She takes off running, and we see the man appear from behind one of the trees. When Harper gets home, she calls Reilly and tells her all of the events that have unfolded and Reilly angrily tells Harper she is going to drive to her rental to stay with her because this rental is important to her. She had been saving up to go somewhere to heal from her ex husband’s death and Reilly is not going to let Harper’s trip be ruined by these men. When Harper tries to tell Reilly the address, her facetime keeps cutting in and out so Reilly texts her and says to just message it to her. She shares her location with Reilly, and Reilly replies “I ALREADY KNOW WHERE YOU ARE” “U STUPID BITCH”. The lights outside keep turning on and off.
Harper walks over to the window to see the police officer standing in her yard. She approaches him but he will not speak back to her. Everything goes dark, and the officer is gone by the time the lights come back on. All of the apples on the tree fall to the ground. Then, the angry man from the bar is screaming and running toward her. She manages to get inside in the hisue and lock the door before asking him the rhetorical question to end all rhetorical questions, which is “why are you doing this?” all of the lights go out in and out of the house and Harper manages to get to the kitchen to grab a knife and a window breaks. She screams, and there is a pounding at the door. she announces that she has a weapon and if the person at the door enters the home, she is going to use it. So evidently, it is not stand your ground state.
In walks Geoffrey, who says he is there because he heard screaming and glass shattering. He immediately enters the kitchen, where he expects to find the naked man but instead finds a crow with a broken wing. He kills the bird to save it from its misery and she explains that she saw the officer and another man outside and assures him she is not making this up. He tells her that he believes her because obviously it already happened once today. He goes outside to see if he can find someone and is sure to let Harper know that when there is a damsel in distress, he is the one to call. She pleads with him to stay inside the house, but he tells her about how his dad told him when he was young that he had the makings of a failed military man, and that this somehow means a lot to him. So he goes outside, stands in the middle of the yard and yells to the “intruder”. They don’t hear any movement or anything, so he declares that whoever it was, they are probably gone. All of the lights turn off again and Geoffrey is gone. When they turn back on, Harper is greeted by the naked man, who is now within just feet of her. He takes a deep breathe, and blows dandelions at her. With her head tilted back, she releases one tear and has visions of herself screaming and of the statue from the church in her bedroom, smiling at it. she goes into the house and closes the door.
The man reaches his hand through the mail drop in the door and she touches his hand. When he grabs her wrist threateningly, she stabs the top of his forearm. Now, he has to slide his arm out of the mail slot with the knife perpendicular, slicing his arm in half from the elbow all the way through the hand. In the kitchen is Samuel with his left arm split in two. He is playing with the dead crow on the counter and has placed his mask over the crows head. He says “you really hurt me”, so that means that the naked man and Samuel are the same person. He tells her how mean she is and that she will probably play hide and seek now but she says she will cut him. He says she probably should, because it will be her last chance. She closes a door between him and her and counts to 10. When she says ready or not here I come, she is approached by the second man from the bar running after her, again with the split arm. She goes to the bathroom and slams the door. the vicar opens the door with his split arm and recites to her a piece from Agamemnon before washing off his hand in the sink.
He asks her when she lost her virginity because he has been thinking about it. he tells her he considers her an “expert in her carnality”, that this is her “power” that she exerts on others. He grabs her dress in her pubic region and gets on his knees. She puts the knife to his throat. He stands up and with his split hand grabs each side of her throat. He pushes her against the bathroom vanity to rape her, but she stabs him in the side and leaves. She runs to the car and drives off in a hurry. While speeding off, she hits Geoffrey with her car as he stands in the street. He opens her car door and pulls her out of the car by her hair and throws her on the ground. He gets into the car and drives away. Harper looks up at the sky and notices that there are shooting stars and it looks like maybe a galaxy. Then, in the distance, Geoffrey in her car comes speeding back to run her over. She manages to run back to the rental, where Geoffrey wrecks the car.
In her yard, the naked man approaches her again. This time, his entire face is green with leaves. Then, he drops to the ground and begins to give birth. He first births Samuel, who births the vicar, who births Geoffrey, who births James.
