Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Don’t Come Home’ tells the twisted tale of a woman and her daughter as one looks for the other in a house that holds many secrets. The story begins with a woman named Varee driving into the night with her daughter, Min. Varee is running from her abusive husband and hopes to find a haven in her childhood home, which she hasn’t been to for thirty years following a particularly traumatic incident. At the house, away from her past traumas, Varee hopes to begin a new life with Min. But a few days later, the girl goes missing. Varee doesn’t know that Min had been seeing a terrifying ghost all this while, and the reason for her disappearance had something to do with the ghost and what happened in the house thirty years back. SPOILERS AHEAD
What Happens to Min? Is She Found?
Initially, Min’s disappearance seems to be tied to the supernatural entity haunting the house. Since their arrival, Min has glimpses of a scary ghost with fire eyes, especially when the lights go out and the place gets dark. Her mother, however, remains oblivious to the presence of the ghost. Instead, she sees a little girl in a mask running around the house. At the end of Episode 1, the ghost shows up in Min’s room, and when she tries to hide in the closet, she is pulled in by something and is never seen again. It is much later that we discover that the thing that pulled her away was not a ghost or anything supernatural at all. It was Panida and her time machine in 1992.
A flashback to thirty years or so before the events of the show brings us to 1991. At the time, the house is inhabited by Panida, her husband, and her daughter, Varee. While they want her to spend more time with them, Panida is more invested in her work. She works at a hydropower plant where she is working on something so unique that even she doesn’t fully understand it yet. Her detached behavior causes her daughter a lot of pain, and when her husband chides her about it, Panida decides to go on a day trip with them but doesn’t bother to hide her grudge. On the way, when her daughter tries to interact with her, and she rebuffs her advances, her husband asks her to go back if she doesn’t want to be with them. Angrily, she tells him to stop the car and storms out of the vehicle. As her crying daughter calls out to her, a truck hits the car, and Panida’s daughter and husband perish in one stroke.
The loss of her family hits Panida very hard, and she regrets not giving them more time when they were alive. She blames herself for their deaths, and eventually, when she can’t deal with the pain, she decides to kill herself. While she stands on the bridge, which crosses the dam that also happens to be her workplace, something very interesting happens. A black mass appears right below her, and her broken sandal falls into it. Panida is shocked to realize that this is the very sandal that she’d found inside the plant when she was investigating the machine that caused a similar black mass from which the footwear had come out.
It doesn’t take much for Panida to realize that the machine can get one to travel in time. To work on it better, she gets the machine to her place and puts it in the basement. Eventually, when she gets the machine to work, she steps inside it and, with all her heart, wishes to be taken back to the day her family died, hoping that she could avert their tragic fate. But it doesn’t work like that. When the machine doesn’t give her what she wants, she pushes the buttons of the machine in fury, which is when it is activated. This time, it brings back a young girl who calls herself Min.
When Panida’s machine works, it flows through time into the future and creates a hole through which things from the future fall into it and land in the past. At the time that it is operating, time becomes fluid, and everything that has ever happened inside the house exists at once, mingling the past, present, and future. At the same time, the machine also expands into a circular mass that extends beyond the cage created by Panida. Anything that is inside the circle will be thrown back into the past. When Min, in 2024, hides in the closet, she has no idea that she is directly above the machine. In 1992, when Panida activates the machine, time becomes fluid, the black mass opens up, and Min falls through it, landing in 1992. This is why she disappears without a trace from 2024 and is never found in that timeline again. However, she does return to the house in 2024, but in a very different manner.
Does Varee Die?
As the past and the future fold into each other, a very complex picture of Varee’s life appears. She’d left her mother’s house thirty years ago and remembers very few things about it. But when she comes back to the house with her daughter, all the secrets that Panida had buried start coming to light. The first secret is the fact that Varee was not Panida’s biological daughter. Panida’s daughter, who was named Varee, died in an accident, and the loss drove her crazy. Eventually, Panida brought Min from 2024 to 1992, and the little girl started healing the broken parts of her heart and soul.
Over the course of time, Panida got so attached to Min that she started considering her the daughter she’d lost. However, she still had to explain to people who exactly Min was. At first, she introduces Min as the daughter of her distant relatives, who sent Min to live with her. But as time passes, and people start to wonder why her parents are not taking her back, Panida decides to shut down any questions permanently. She says she has adopted Min, and she is now her daughter, for all intents and purposes. But then, one night, when the thought of her real daughter crosses her mind, Panida starts the machine again, hoping that if a girl like Min could come through the machine, perhaps there was a chance that her daughter could come back as well.
By now, it’s clear that the machine only brings forth things from the future to the past. She also doesn’t realize that she has to be above the machine to be sucked into the past rather than standing inside the glass cage. So, when she starts the machine, time becomes fluid, and the past and the future fuse into each other, which is how Varee 2024 hears the voice of her daughter Min in 1992. As she goes back to her daughter’s room, the furniture is up in the air again due to the effect of the machine, and when she opens the closet, she is sucked into it and then thrown into the past. Varee is shocked to see her mother, Panida, on the other side of the cage. She tries to explain things to her, but Panida doesn’t understand. And then Varee mentions that she has a daughter, Min, who has gone missing.
Instead of trying to find out where Varee and Min came from, Panida is gripped with the fear of losing her daughter all over again. After keeping Varee in the cage for a while, she decides to do away with her and tells Natee to take her away and kill her. Natee tries to take her away in his car, but she crashes it and runs away. She almost finds her daughter, but Natee intercepts her and takes her back to the cage. Eventually, she finds a way to break the cage and attacks Natee, stabbing him in the eye while also realizing who he is and how he got the scar. She heads upstairs to get Min, but Panida finds her. While Varee shoots Panida, the latter throws her off the gallery. Varee could have survived the fall, but then the chandelier breaks and falls right on her, burning her face and killing her instantly. But that’s not the end of her story.
Who is the Ghost? Is Min Her Own Mother?
When Varee dies, Panida decides to leave the house and take Min with her to Bangkok. At this time, she decides to turn Min into her daughter permanently and renames her Varee. Years later, when Min grows up, Panida realizes that she looks exactly like the woman who landed inside the cage, claiming to be Min’s mother and Panida’s daughter. The more Panida thinks about it, the more she realizes that the woman had been right and that Panida had ended up killing her own daughter. This realization added to the confusion created by her brain in her old age, led her to lose her mind. She is gripped by the guilt that she killed her daughter for the second time, and her heart breaks to know that Min, now Varee, is doomed to repeat the same cycle over and over again.
The way the events unfold, it is clear that Min and Varee are the same person. The girl, named Min, was born in 2019. When she was five, she went to the house in 2024. From there, she traveled to 1992, where she was taken in by Panida, who raised her as Varee. Varee grew up to become a reporter. She met and fell in love with Yutthachai, with whom she had a daughter, Min, in 2019. While their marriage was loving in the beginning, he turned out to be an abusive person. After bearing with him for years, Varee decided to run away for good, taking Min with her to her mother’s house, which she’d left thirty years ago, bringing us to the events of the year 2024.
What makes things more interesting is that not only are Min and Varee the same person, but they are also a mother-daughter loop. Varee gave birth to Min in 2019; Min traveled back to 1992 and was renamed Varee, and then gave birth in 2019 to a girl named Min. This means that Min/Varee gave birth to herself. To take it even further, we have the case of the strange ghost that only Min seems to be able to see. When time travel comes into the picture, the supernatural aspect of the story seems to slide into the background, but it never completely disappears. The ghost is always around, and the reason for its existence is revealed in 1992, on the day Panida decides to leave the house permanently with Min/Varee.
It turns out that the ghost is Varee herself. When she fell from the first floor, the chandelier fell on her face and completely burnt it. Because she died inside the house, her spirit was trapped there forever. Because she died of the burn, her face took that charred look with a fire burning in her eyes. Being alone in the house for years morphed her into a dark, looming entity, which was brought back to life when Varee and Min returned to the house three decades later. Because Varee died before completely grasping the extent of the situation, she always saw Min as her daughter and not as herself. So, years later, when five-year-old Min was back in the house, Varee’s ghost was gripped by the desire to be with her daughter again; this is why she would always appear to Min and not her older self. At the end of the day,
Read More: Is Netflix’s Don’t Come Home Based on a True Story?
