Summary
“Dear Granny” is entertaining until it gets stupid in the final act.
I was not feeling “Dear Granny,” Episode 7 of Terror Tuesday: Extreme, mainly because it resorts to B-horror efforts by the final act. I understood its assignment, but it felt poorly executed.
The disappearance of the grandma
The episode begins with the grandmother looking at a bucket of eels with her daughter, Montha. She wants to release them into the river for her birthday, but her daughter is insistent that the current is too strong and it will only kill them.
However, while Montha is distracted, the grandmother disappears, leaving only her shoes behind. Montha fears the worst — that her mother was swept up by the river.
Fractured mother-daughter relationship and the ritual
Montha is mortified and distraught that her mother is missing, but her daughter, Nulek, is furious with her mother, claiming she dampens the family. She spends most of “Dear Granny” speaking to her friend Alice, wishing she had a different mother and feeling resentful over her relationship with her.
Strangely, which becomes an event later in the story, Alice suggests that her grandmother is playing hide and seek.
The ritual
A distraught Montha visits a psychic the next day, who tells her that her mother is still around and that she can use a costly ritual to bring her home by pleading to the Four Heavenly Kings. By doing so, the grandmother will return in three days. The ritual involved bundling her mother’s shoes and leaving them on her bed.
By the third day, the grandmother returns, much to the delight of Montha and Nulek.
Hide and seek
While her mother is at work, Nulek finds herself terrorized by her grandmother. At first, it looks as if her grandmother is giggling innocently before caressing her granddaughter’s hair and singing lullabies.
But the story turns on its head when Montha receives a call from the police: her mother has been found dead in the river. So, who on earth is the grandmother at home?
Nulek is not with her grandmother; she’s with a demon that has formed into her relative, and before she knows it, she’s playing a cruel game of hide and seek with her. The demon looks nothing like the grandmother by the end of the episode. It’s determined to kill Nulek and, at first, cuts off one of her ears.
In a moment of stress and horror, while the demon counts down in the evil hide-and-seek, Nulek escapes via the bathroom window while seriously wounding herself.
Outside, the demon chases her with a knife, but Nulek is run over by her mother in a car. When Montha looks at who she hit, she finds Nulek’s shoes bundled together, with her photo planted on them.
The episode ends by revealing that a young man was investigating Montha’s house. He reveals that Montha lives alone, and the daughter has run away. He believes the house is haunted. On his PC screen, there’s a reflection of the grandma and Nulek with demonic faces, and suddenly, his throat is slit.
It’s possible that the family was cursed by demonic possessions in the house, which started with the dead grandmother and spread to the granddaughter. But was the granddaughter dead all along, too? It’s possible; when Montha ran Nulek over, there was no immediate sign of a dead body, just bundled shoes.
That’s where the ambiguity remains: how much of what we saw of the episode was real? Either the ending suggests that the curse had spread, or the mother was alone all along and desperate in grief, using a ritual that compounded her experience.
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