Somewhere Quiet Explained- Who Kidnapped Meg, What Was Real, And Who Was The Older Woman?

It’s hard to separate reality from perception in Somewhere Quiet. This is partly due to a highly sympathetic protagonist and because those around her behave abhorrently. It’s impossible not to share Meg’s viewpoint, which is the point of Olivia West Lloyd’s film. Meg can be both right and wrong about what’s happening around her and to her. That’s the genius of gaslighting. It forces you to doubt everything you see and feel. Here’s what you need to know about Somewhere Quiet: what was real, and if Scott and Madelin kidnapped Meg.

Meg, a brilliant Jennifer Kim of Black Bear, is a married engineer who was kidnapped and held hostage for six months before she escaped. The ordeal was horrific, and we see the final moments of her escape in the opening minutes of the film. She is limping and terrified and somehow has a shotgun. A man who was stopped on the side of the road tries to help, but in her terror, she points the gun at him and flees in his truck. Everything following the opening sequence is seen through Meg’s eyes and, therefore, is hard to trust.

The ending of Somewhere Quiet

Before they even leave their house, things are strained between Scott and Meg. He acts weird around her, corrects her packing technique, and is domineering. Maybe this is because he is worried about her and isn’t sure how to help her following her kidnapping, but it could also be part of a more significant pattern. As time goes on, it becomes evident that it is baked into the DNA of their relationship.

On their first night in the house, Meg breaks a glass while cleaning up after dinner, and Scott quickly shoos her out and cleans up. Later that night, she had trouble sleeping and looked at everything on the walls. One of those is a decorative plate with a religious saying on it. It reads, “Prepare To Meet Thy God”. A dog nearby startles her, and she drops the plate, breaking it. Before she can clean anything up, Scott sleepwalks down the stairs and back to the bedroom. It is an unnerving event that scares her. When she returns to the bedroom, he is fully asleep and consoles her when she wakes him up. In the morning, he denies the sleepwalking. He further denies knowing anything about a dog or the broken plate, which is now missing.

The question becomes, did she confuse a nightmare with reality in Somewhere Quiet? Scott tells her she has confused actual events with a dream, but later, Meg finds the broken plate in the trash and knows he was lying to her. Meg keeps the shard of the plate in her dresser drawer as a totem to ground her in reality. It is tangible proof that she isn’t crazy. We also know the dog exists because Cousin Madelin shows up with a dog in tow the next night.

She and Scott are unnaturally close and casually ruthless. Madelin, in particular, seems to love to poke at Meg. She callously speaks Korean to her and asks if her name is short for Megumi because she assumes Meg couldn’t be short for a more traditional white name. She also snaps at her about feeding her dog and later chastises her for asking about the repayment of the neighbor’s boat that she destroyed. Instead of recognizing that she and Scott were entitled twats, she chided Meg for discussing money at the dinner table. It is a grossly out-of-touch sentiment that Scott goes along with. Despite seeing his wife’s discomfort, he sides with Madelin.

Little by little, Meg begins to suspect they are both lying to her. Too many details don’t add up, and she catches her husband in several lies. She asks to leave, and they plan to go that day, but a flat tire stops them. On what should have been her last night at the beach house, Scott forces Meg to party with Madelin at yet another family house near the beach. It’s an odd choice at best and cruel at worst. He knew she was uncomfortable with Madelin and knew Meg was on edge, yet he is so selfish he takes her there anyway. It’s no wonder Meg unravels entirely after that.

She repeatedly begs him to leave, but he ignores her and instead parties with Madelin. It is at that moment that she snaps and imagines bashing Scott’s head with a wine bottle and beating Madelin’s head into a piano. Later, Scott and Madeliene strip naked and wrestle on the beach. In a panic, Meg jumps on a bike and rides off. She crashes trying to avoid the woman she has seen throughout Somewhere Quiet and wakes up on the side of the road with a dead dog nearby. She drags the dog into the woods and wakes up filthy and confused. It’s only later that we learn she hit Madelin’s dog and semi-buried it in the woods before passing out.

At this point, things deteriorate past their breaking point. She runs to Madelin’s house and searches for Madeleine’s mother, who she had been told was bedridden throughout the film. Instead, she finds legal paperwork applying for Power of Attorney over her. She knocks Madelin unconscious and ties her up in the basement. She next likely imagines a final condemning speech from Madelin. It is all the things that Meg probably worries about. Meg’s delusion gets the better of her, and she completely breaks with reality. She imagines Madelin’s speech at the end, but Scott probably did try to shoot her. He was a coward and profoundly selfish. Meg was a burden, and he would rather she go away. He couldn’t divorce her because he would look like a monster and needed her money, but he was exhausted by her needs.

After trying and failing to shoot her, he pleads with her to leave. Just as she is deciding to, she once again fades into a sunny memory or delusion about Madelin and Scott leaving her to drown. She is utterly convinced they tried to kill her, and everything that she does is in self-defense. She shot Scott, and the recoil knocked her down, and that is why she had the water hallucination again.

Waking up with Scott’s dead body on her, she takes off her sweatshirt, revealing the same sweater we saw her in at the beginning of Somewhere Quiet. It ended how it began, with Meg driving away in a stolen truck. Only after she drove off did it finally occur to her that maybe nothing had happened as she had thought. After going through a myriad of emotions, Meg stops the truck and gets out calmly to wait for the police. She may have realized she wasn’t in control of herself, or she may just be resigned to escaping another violent situation. We have no way of knowing.

Classism and passive cruelty in Somewhere Quiet

Throughout the film, Madelin and Scott tell obnoxious stories and refuse to acknowledge their privilege. They are almost pathological in their denial of their family’s troubled past. Instead of acknowledging the blatant imperialism and Meg’s discomfort, they turn things around on her as if she is overly sensitive. Over time, the Whitman’s wealth waned, and now they aren’t exactly poor but feel as if they are because they no longer have the exorbitant wealth they once did. Meg’s money, however, came from her parent’s inheritance, so she did not grow up rich. As an Asian American, she also probably faced bigotry. We know she was adopted from South Korea when she was three, but we don’t know what ethnicity her parents were. If they were white, it would add more complexity to her feelings surrounding Scott and his family.

Scott and Madelin ignore her lived experience and their family’s troubled past behavior and choose to wear it as a badge of privilege. Like the Cattons from Saltburn minus the stately palace, they wore their entitlement like a shield, deflecting all wrongdoing under a cloak of civility.

Was Scott having an affair with Madelin?

Meg questions their relationship from the beginning. They don’t toast her on the first night over dinner together, and they touch more than is typical for cousins. We know Scott lied about visiting his Cape Cod house. He told Meg he hadn’t been there in years, but the young man at the beach said he was there earlier in the year. He was likely there with Madelin when he should have been home looking for Meg. Maybe they were trying to drive Meg crazy after she got home. Perhaps they did conspire against her. It’s possible they were just shitty people who were obnoxious and oblivious to how their behavior affected others.

Did Scott and Madelin kidnap Meg?

Meg’s husband might not be the person who kidnapped her, but he is arguably not a great husband. She tries to talk to Scott about her time in captivity. She talks about counting the footsteps of the kidnappers to give herself a minuscule amount of control. Instead of talking it through with her or listening intentionally, Scott tells her to write it down in her journal. He doesn’t want to help her.

We don’t know if that is because he is lazy and uncomfortable or doesn’t care for her. He belittles her, shares her intimate secrets, and constantly allows Madelin to upset her. He and Madelin certainly had motive and opportunity. We know he parked his car in the garage and asked her to retrieve his phone, both out of character. By the end of Somewhere Quiet, Meg believes he and Madelin planned the kidnapping, but we can’t know for sure.

We don’t have much context about who kidnapped her or why. There didn’t appear to be any ransom demands, and the only obvious motive was that Meg had just come into a large sum of money. We also don’t know how she escaped or if the kidnappers were caught. Without those clues, we can’t say if Meg was right or wrong. We do know her husband was inconsiderate and uncaring, though. One of the most telling scenes is a sex scene between Meg and Scott. In the middle of intercourse, Meg hears banging on the closet doors, but Scott holds her in place until he orgasms. This is symbolic of what Meg already suspects about her husband. She thinks he is selfish and held her in place literally when she was held hostage and figuratively now.

We don’t know who took Meg prior to the events of Somewhere Quiet. If the plan were to take her money, it would make more sense to kill her outright. If the videos that Scott lied about seeing had ransom demands, then it is possible he wasn’t involved with the kidnapping but is still a gaslighting opportunist. Maybe after marrying her, he decided she was too difficult to handle, and the kidnapping was convenient. He could have wanted her gone without being involved with the kidnapping plot.

Scott and Madelin need money and are unnaturally close. If he went Cape Cod to grieve and instead started an affair with Madelin, he wouldn’t be thrilled Meg returned home. Madeline may not even be who she claims to be. The oil painting in her house shows a young girl who is blonde and a young boy who she claims is her dead brother. It wouldn’t be a shock if this woman were not related to Scott and instead a family friend. Of course, it’s also possible their cousin’s love is more than it should be.

What was real in Somewhere Quiet

We are led to believe that what we see at the beginning is Meg’s escape from her kidnappers when it is her escape from Scott and Madelin. Such is the nature of the film. Everything we see is warped through the lens of trauma. She has panic attacks interlaced between sunny dreams of the ocean. The bright dreams were probably memories she retreated into during her kidnapping and now when things become too stressful.

There are several beach scenes where Scott and Meg are happy. Mostly, these scenes coincide with intense moments of fear, which leads me to believe this was her mind’s way of coping with her PTSD. Scott isn’t helpful as he won’t talk about anything with her, doesn’t support her, and, in one instance, reacts violently to an argument.

Meg wants to talk about what happened, but Scott shuts her down. He may not be a kidnapper, but he is undoubtedly a gaslighter. Scott denies Madelin’s questionable behavior and refuses to talk about what Meg went through. He doesn’t want to talk about how she was poisoned or that she was forced to make videos begging for his help. He claims he never saw any videos. This later turns out to be a lie when she finds them on his laptop. He later admits that he was at the beach house when it arrived in the mail and hadn’t seen it for over a month.

All of that was real. Just because some of what she sees is real doesn’t mean it all is. Scott almost certainly didn’t bang his head repeatedly against the wall because he would have bruises the next day if he did. He probably also didn’t sleepwalk at any point. Scott claims she sleepwalked, which, although he did gaslight her often, he could have been telling the truth about that.

Small details bother her throughout Somewhere Quiet. When invited into Maddy’s house, she stares into the basement. Is she subconsciously remembering something from when she was kidnapped? Was she held in that house and doesn’t remember it all? If that is the case, it is no wonder she was triggered by being there.

Madelin was tied up unconscious or dead in the basement, and Scott was also, at a minimum, unconscious when Meg ran off. Whether they had been involved in a larger plot to kidnap her and when that didn’t work to drive her insane, we don’t definitively know. We know she was kidnapped once and is now terrified.

One interesting thing to note is the section of the plate that Meg keeps says Prepare. Maybe Meg did find a piece of the plate, proving that Scott is lying to her, but it might also be one more signpost preparing her to fight for her life. Hearing the news story about her escape and seeing the protestor’s sign indicating it was always the husband could have planted another seed of doubt in her mind. Meg may have concluded that her husband couldn’t be trusted. She likely suspected this all along. Did Meg fall victim to the cycle of violence? Is she trapped in her own personal Hell she can’t escape from? Maybe both are true.

Who is the older woman in the woods?

Meg sees an older woman in the woods many times during Somewhere Quiet. Madelin insists it isn’t her mother who couldn’t get out of bed. No one else was supposedly at the family compound so that she could have been a hallucination, or she could be one more Whitman who was looking to cash in on Meg’s precarious mental state and large bank account. She looks similar to the painting in Madelin’s house, and there wasn’t anyone in the bedroom when Meg investigated, so part of the story is untrue.

It’s possible Madelin’s mother died a long time ago, and she is lying about it now for unknown reasons. Meg is clearly uncomfortable with the matriarchs in this family, so she could hallucinate her out of fear. She does not appear anytime during the violent fight on the last night, which leads me to think she doesn’t exist at all. She represents what Meg most dislikes about the Whitmans. In her mind, she is judgmental, entitled, paternalistic, and racist. She is colonialism in physical form.

Like Antichrist before it, Somewhere Quiet shows what happens when ignorance and hubris combine with disastrous results. Meg needed professional help, and instead, she got isolated. Maybe that was by design, and she wasn’t paranoid. Her husband and his cousin/girlfriend could have conspired against her. Some of what happened in Somewhere Quiet could be explained by perception coloring belief, but not all. What isn’t in dispute is Scott and Madelin tried to dim Meg’s light and paid the price.