Aahana Swrup
‘Somewhere Quiet,’ the psychological thriller film, revolves around a deeply traumatized woman whose unseen past haunts her present, sending her into a spiral of fear and mistrust. Meg Rhoads, an abduction survivor, travels to her husband, Scott Whitman’s family cabin, in the middle of the woods to get away from regular life and heal from her highly traumatic kidnapping. However, in her search for normalcy, all Meg finds are paranoia and doubt as her past continues to cast a shadow over her reality. As such, the unpredictable arrival of another party, Madelin, heightens the precarious nature of the situation, leading Meg down adverse roads.
The film employs an unreliable narrator for its protagonist, utilizing Meg’s paranoia— born from her recent traumatic experiences— to highlight the gravity of the underlying horror in her inability to distinguish nightmares from reality. Consequently, the plot remains ripe with thrilling twists and turns, concluding with an explosive ending that leaves a few threads in loose ends. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Somewhere Quiet Plot Synopsis
Meg Rhoads and her husband, Scott Whitman, escape into the quiet wilderness, where the latter’s family cabin serves as a place for his wife’s healing following her rescue from a traumatic abduction. Meg remains relatively paranoid about her surroundings but tries to put on a brave face for her partner, who is visibly out of depth in the situation. On their first night at the cabin, the woman undergoes an unnerving experience. Nevertheless, Scott denies her perception of reality the following day, chalking it up to a highly realistic nightmare.
Meg’s discomfort gets further pushed to the corner as Madelin, Scott’s cousin, drops by the cabin. As it turns out, she’s staying at her mother’s house nearby to look after the aging woman. The two cousins get on like a house on fire, leaving Meg on the sidelines. The latter’s nightmares persist while her husband remains unwilling to listen to her talk about her brutal experience, instead steering her to journal her emotions or talk them through with her therapist. Furthermore, he insists that her reality is being filtered through her nightmares, pushing her to question the validity of her truth.
The same, paired with Madelin’s unsettling presence and the accidentally acquired knowledge that Scott was at the cabin last winter— when Meg went missing— forces the latter down a deeper rabbit hole of suspicion. Simultaneously, she keeps seeing the apparition of an old lady in unlikely places. Even though she assumes the lady might be Madelin’s elder mother, the other woman confirms that her mother is bedridden. Eventually, a significant hiccup arrives after a conversation over dinner, which leads to a disagreement between Meg and Madelin. Worse yet, during the same, Scott shares sensitive information about his wife’s abduction with his cousin, bringing up unpleasant reminders.
Afterward, Meg tries to talk to Scott about her abduction again and only receives the latter’s avoidance. The cycle continues until, eventually, the couple has a confrontation that angers Scott after he realizes that Meg doesn’t trust him not to be behind her kidnapping. Consequently, it leads to an altercation, where Meg locks herself in her room, unable to realize whether or not her husband is attempting to knock her door down in fury. The following morning, Scott apologizes profusely and agrees to his wife’s demands of returning home. Conveniently enough, their car gets a flat tire the same day, extending their stay at the cabin.
For the evening, Scott pushes Meg to spend time with Madeline at another family cabin. However, the night only feeds more of her paranoia once she witnesses the two cousins undressed and playfully wrestling each other by the beach. Thus, she attempts to escape from the place on a motorbike but gets in an accident that kills Madelin’s dog. After spending the night by the roadside, Meg returns home and breaks down in front of her husband, who tells her he intentionally planned Madelin’s presence since he can’t figure out how to help her alone. Meg almost convinces herself to believe her husband over her own version of reality. Nonetheless, everything changes once she finds a USB stick in Scott’s things that holds the ransom video from her abduction that the latter has so far patently denied receiving.
Somewhere Quiet Ending: Who Kidnapped Meg?
The story begins in the aftermath of Meg’s kidnapping. Yet, since her recovery journey is the narrative’s central focus, the kidnapping becomes part of the story’s nucleus, influencing every aspect of the protagonist’s experiences. As far as the film reveals, some unknown people kidnapped Meg after she went into her house’s garage to retrieve her husband’s phone from his car. After the abduction, the woman’s assailants kept her locked inside a house, where they would often poison her food to keep her on the edge. Furthermore, they recorded several videos of her begging for someone— usually Scott— to come and save her, intending to send them as ransom notes.
The details of Meg’s rescue remain ambiguous since Scott insists he’s doing everything to help his wife and continues not speaking about her experience. Even so, the fact remains that at some point in the police investigation, the husband was a suspect. Nonetheless, the police eventually cleared him and confirmed his story of having never received any ransom notes from the kidnappers. Therefore, for all intents and purposes, the general understanding emerges that Scott had nothing to do with Meg’s kidnapping. Still, as the story had made it into the public conscience, many believed him to be guilty, claiming that “it’s always the husband.”
Similarly, Meg herself cannot shake off the feeling that Scott was somehow involved in her abduction. She begins to suspect the same once she learns about his visit to the Whitman cabin during her disappearance. Scott seems to have been there with Madelin, with whom he shares a seemingly incestuous closeness, further feeding his wife’s suspicions. Whereas Scott had been holding onto plausible deniability so far since there was no evidence against him, the USB stick changed everything. Moreover, after the video is discovered, Meg discovers another disturbing truth while searching for car keys to escape from the Whitman cabin. As it would turn out, Scott and Madelin were preparing official papers to take over Meg’s legal guardianship. The evidence finally confirms to the woman that she isn’t safe with her husband, who is planning to exploit her for her wealth with his cousin.
Afterward, a confrontation between Madelin and Meg ends with the latter tying up the former in her house’s basement to extract certain truths from her. Scott finds his wife and cousin in the same scene and reveals that he lied about the ransom videos to escape further suspicions from the police. According to his account of the events, he visited the cabin to mourn Meg, making premature assumptions about her death. Therefore, Scott hadn’t been home to receive the USB stick and felt it was too late to come out about it. Still, since Meg knows he was at the cabin with Madelin, she can’t help but feel betrayed that her husband tried to move on from her within a month of her disappearance.
Still, Scott denies having any involvement in Meg’s abduction. Even though numerous signs point out that he sports an ill will toward his wife, the same may be unconnected to her kidnapping. The incident could have just been a lucky coincidence for Scott, who was already a lousy husband. In the end, Meg’s circumstances have made it impossible for her to get a firm answer. Due to her constant paranoia, Scott’s perpetual disregard of her truth, and the unuttered nature of the abduction, Meg can never truly know if Scott planned the crime. However, the same remains the film’s center, which seeks to highlight the unreliable nature of Meg’s reality.
Why Does Scott Want Meg Dead?
Although Scott’s involvement in Meg’s kidnapping remains up for debate, the man all but confirms that he wants Meg dead by the film’s end. During their confrontation in the basement, he tries to shoot and choke Meg, with the latter barely escaping her demise both times. Meg’s character is an unreliable narrator whose version of events becomes the cardinal truth for the film’s storyline while remaining highly untrustworthy within the universe. In contrast, her husband’s character presents a different but equally menacing kind of unreliability.
Throughout the film, Scott pitches a different version of himself than the one his actions actually make him out to be. In one breath, he insists he wants to help Meg; in the other, he breaks her trust by reading her journal— the same one he forces her to write. Time and time again, he always sides with his cousin whenever a disagreement arises between her and his wife. Despite arriving at the cabin to help Meg recover, Scott consistently forces her to spend time with Madelin, who clearly causes discomfort for the other woman.
In fact, Scott’s alarming unreliability expands even further than that. On the first night at the cabin, Meg breaks a novelty plate during a late-night house exploration. However, by morning, the event’s evidence had been erased from the room, leaving the woman to wonder if the night had really been a nightmare. Nonetheless, while emptying the trash, Meg realizes Scott threw away the plate’s remnants. Therefore, since he lied about the plate, he could have very well lied about his own sleepwalking. To take it one step further, he could’ve staged his own sleepwalking to gaslight Meg into thinking her trauma is making her nightmares bleed into her reality.
Although these instances appear confusing at first, a possible explanation for them emerges with the discovery of the guardianship papers. Before her kidnapping, Meg came into some money with the death of her adoptive parents, who left behind their life insurance for her. Thus, if one operates on the belief that Scott wasn’t behind the kidnapping, one can make the argument that Scott purposefully ignored the ransom video to ensure Meg died, leaving her inheritance for him. Consequently, after his wife escaped from the situation, he realized that he needed to take a different route to fulfill his newfound lucrative fantasies.
Since Scott was previously a suspect in Meg’s abduction, he can’t kill the woman without attracting attention. For the same reason, he could’ve come up with the scheme to gaslight her into thinking she was going insane, allowing him to take over as her legal guardian. By doing so, he would become in charge of her finances, utilizing them for his own benefit. If the same is true, it is likely that he employed help from Madelin— his forbidden lover— to orchestrate the events at the cabin, driving Meg to the edge. In any case, Meg likely believes the same when her husband lunges to attack her with his bare hands. Thus, in the end, she fights him off and escapes into the forest to save her life.
Why Does Meg Stop Her Car in the Middle of Nowhere?
After Meg escapes from the Whitman cabin on foot, leaving an incapacitated Madelin and Scott behind, she tumbles through the woods and runs into a truck driver. The scene takes the viewers back to the film’s opening, in which the narrative glimpsed at the same event. Although previously, the viewers could believe the protagonist’s haphazard state to be a result of her escaping from her kidnappers, the ending brings the realization that she was escaping from Scott and Madelin instead. Consequently, a parallel is drawn between the two events in terms of their influence over the woman.
Armed with a shotgun, Meg threatens the truck driver and steals his car, showcasing the depth of her mistrust of people at the moment. Afterward, she drives the car away, uncaring of her destination. Right then, she only wants to escape from her situation and doesn’t care where the drive may take her. Her emotions are further highlighted through her maniacal cries and laugh as she finally allows herself to express her feelings and trauma in tears and screams. However, amid this breakdown, she stops the car in the middle of the road, emerging from it to look into the camera.
As the police sirens wail in the background, the credits roll in before Meg can entirely break the fourth wall. Much like the rest of the film, her abrupt decision to stop in the middle of nowhere can also have multiple interpretations. If one believes Meg has been delusional throughout the story, with her trauma compelling her to doubt and project onto her husband, her reaction to the sirens can be a sign of her finally facing reality. Inversely, if one believes Meg is in real danger from her husband, the sirens can signify the character realizing that she finally no longer needs to run. Having started her story as a kidnapping survivor, Meg’s end— standing in the middle of a road, no longer running from an abuser— can be seen as a moment of freedom for the character.
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