On an average day, you’d be happy to know that your dead relative has left an estate in your name. But life isn’t quite so normal and nice in writer-director Sasha Sibley’s world. With a low-budget production, Sibley manages to put together a decent horror flick with dense lore, which feels fresh in her latest movie, The Painted. The film features unfulfilled love, mad revenge, and unabashed creepiness in a few sequences. All things considered, let’s dive into dissecting the movie.
Spoilers Ahead
What happens in the movie?
A husband sits beside his ailing wife and takes her ring off to perform a ritual that might make his wife better. However, when he summons the spirit who is possessing his wife, a picture of the spirit paints itself on the canvas he set up. We see a page from a book discussing the occult practice of summoning spirits from paintings, and a naked woman with succubus-like hands appears in the painting. The next minute, she’s out of the painting and possesses the husband to kill the wife.
The Elster family consists of Adam and Evelyn and their kids Nelson, Janice, and Lucy. Adam turns to adult magazines to make up for his underwhelming physical intimacy with his wife. Evelyn is the good old housewife who takes care of everyone in the family without saying a word. Their teenage daughter, Janice, doesn’t like her younger sister, Lucy, but the eldest, Nelson, tries to keep the peace between them. Their lives change when Evelyn is named the executor of her cousin’s estate (the guy who was messing with the haunted portrait). Despite Evelyn having doubts about her next course of action, Adam pretty much forces his wife to travel to the estate. The whole family arrives at the scene, and what was supposed to be a time when the family prepares a catalog for the appraisers turns into a cat-and-mouse chase between them and the haunted paintings of the house.Â
What drives the family out of the estate?
The walls of the mansion are full of eerie portraits of Victorian-era people, along with your basic paintings. The family finds the sultry naked woman’s portrait, and they decide to move it to the attic. Janice comes across a painting that appears to show a barber with his scissors, and she fails to remove the painting from the wall. Later at night, we see Janice’s hair being cut while she’s asleep. The next morning, after a whole debacle with Janice accusing Lucy, the family starts to experience other things. Late at night, Adam reaches for his magazines for some alone time, but he sees the naked woman before she disappears in thin air, as ghosts often do. Evelyn follows who she thinks is Lucy and ends up in the basement. Fortunately for her, all she finds is the magazine, and when she goes to confront Adam, he gaslights her and shifts the conversation to how his business is failing and he can’t provide for much longer. Evelyn falls for it since it’s a more serious crisis. The next night, Janice wakes up while her hair is being cut again, only this time, you see the barber not being present in the painting. Janice is terrified and tries to hide, but the barber grabs her from behind, and she only gets saved when her parents come to the rescue. On the same night, Adam notices the portrait of the naked lady and how her eyes are glowing in the dark. When he reaches for her, we see him get knocked out and only wake up the next morning. He binds the painting with a rope and leaves, hoping for the best. But all hell breaks loose when Nelson’s face is literally consumed by one of the less creepy paintings of a scenery. Adam pulls Nelson out of the painting, and unlike other families in horror movies, they do the smart thing and escape while there’s still time.
Why are the portraits haunted?
While the family was on the estate, Evelyn found the book that described the rituals of the Painted. She finds the publisher’s name, and after returning, she heads straight to their store. She meets a woman who tells her about how the spirits who are summoned through art are called the Painted. The book Evelyn had was one of the last surviving manuscripts that explain the whole ritual. She finds out that the Franco family was one of the foremost practitioners of spirit painting, and even though the ritual was banned by the 1920s, the Franco family possibly continued practicing it. The store has a basement full of such paintings, and they’re kept there for safety reasons. The woman tells Evelyn that spirit painters believed once you are one of the Painted, you could never truly die. Meanwhile, Adam conducts his own research in the library and finds out about the naked woman in the painting and the members of the Franco family from that era. The woman in the painting is Cassandra Dubray, the secret lover of Iver Franco, the best spiritualist of his time. Adam and Evelyn realize that after Cassandra’s death, the Franco family experienced a lot of murders, suicides, and disappearances. While the couple discusses everything, back at home, Lucy is haunted by the kid from the painting Evelyn saw, and she’s only saved by Janice after suffering a great deal of trauma. When Adam finds that one of Lucy’s ordinary paintings has turned into the portrait of Cassandra once again, he puts it on the grill and burns it. However, Evelyn knows it’s not enough, and the only way to get rid of the spirits is to destroy Cassandra. Evelyn and Adam leave for the estate once again, hoping to find Cassandra’s closest possession, a red necklace. That’s the only object that can be used to summon her, and the couple plans to burn the painting once she’s summoned.
Why was Cassandra killing the members of the Franco family?
Evelyn decides to find the necklace, while Adam decides to burn all the remaining paintings in the house, in case they try to intervene. Evelyn does get to the necklace real quick, thanks to some assistance from an unknown source, who hands her the key to where the necklace was kept. Along with the necklace, Evelyn finds countless letters between Cassandra and Iver. While Evelyn is busy uncovering secrets from history, Adam notices three people missing from the portraits, very typical of them. The three spirits make their way to the attic, where they attack Evelyn. Adam rescues his wife, and the couple ends up burning each and every painting inside the house. Evelyn tells Adam how Iver and Cassandra were supposed to marry in secret and elope, but Cassandra got diagnosed with a terminal illness before they could be together. Cassandra asked Iver to make her immortal through the painting, and Iver was supposed to follow suit after she died. However, Iver chose not to kill himself, and he abandoned Cassandra’s portrait to rot in the basement. Just take a moment and think about the issues a dead woman is going to develop from such circumstances. She cursed Iver and his descendants and eventually became a succubus who used the men of the family to kill others before killing them off, too.
Why does Adam sacrifice himself?
Alone in the house, Nelson and his siblings shouldn’t have expected to have a quiet night while their parents were out fighting ghosts. Cassandra takes control of a sleeping Nelson, who picks Lucy up while Janice doesn’t understand anything that’s going on. Nelson takes Lucy to the basement, as everything bad and nasty happens in that specific part of both houses. Janice tries to free Lucy, but Nelson locks the door. When Adam and Evelyn return to the house, Adam tries to tell her something, but they’re alarmed by a frantic Janice, who tells them about Nelson. Adam saves Lucy, who did extremely well to avoid her possessed brother for as long as she did. They lock Nelson in the basement, while Evelyn rushes to start the ceremony to end the horror.
In The Painted’s ending, Evelyn brings the canvas Cassandra appeared from, and Adam nails it to the stand before they start the ritual. To their surprise, the empty canvas now has Cassandra in it. They try to summon Iver, but nothing happens. Evelyn finds out through the book that the ritual can’t be successful if the spirit you’re calling for isn’t willing to participate (consent goes a long way even on the other side). Adam, however, finally reveals to Evelyn that he and Cassandra hooked up when he was in the estate earlier. He realizes that she needs a sacrifice, and if not Iver, it has to be him. Before Evelyn even processes the whole thing, she finds that Adam has already stabbed himself, leaving his lighter, his closest possession, in the middle of the altar. Nelson/Cassandra is still on the hunt, as he bangs the door repeatedly while Evelyn tries to get over the death of her husband. She still rises to the occasion and summons Adam’s spirit to join the painting. Adam appears beside Cassandra, but Evelyn notices Nelson is still possessed, as Cassandra has a wicked smile in the painting. Nelson attacks Evelyn, and as she struggles for life, Janice comes through just in the nick of time to try and save her mother. Janice understands that Evelyn is trying to reach for the lighter, and Janice burns the painting. Cassandra disappears from the painting, and Adam stands there alone. Nelson is okay, unaware of everything that’s happened. The kids notice their dad’s body, and the curse on the Franco family is lifted in exchange for Adam’s life. Adam’s portrait ends up in the attic of the bookstore, and it leaves an opportunity for a sequel if the makers decide to take that route.
