So....
Was Lilly literally scared to death?? Because when it went from her screaming to the ghost it was a huge let down. Polly was just standing there. She wasn't doing anything scary. I guess since Lilly was easily scared, it was enough? I just thought "that's it? Oh and now she's dead. Of course."
That's what I took it to mean. After screaming, Lily was gasping for air, looked like, while pulling on her sweater near her throat.
Polly had just been standing there, it seems like. However, when the camera shows her, she is turning away, as Iris had mentioned she had started doing to Iris years before.
I don't know if Polly intended to kill Lily or not. If she did, why didn't she kill her long before then? Or did Polly just finally get around to facing Lily, as she had done years before with Iris? But Lily couldn't take it...the fright.
Why doesn't Lily then move on, instead of staying in the house? Lily says in narration that the ghost can leave, but chooses to stay near the body.
Significantly, while Lily the ghost comes down the stairs, Lily's body on the floor is shown to be rotting, with insects buzzing around, as Polly so often states throughout the movie. When Polly said earlier in the movie, "This is how you rot," referring to the flowers, was she talking about Lily's impending death? Or did she mean just generally, since the bodies of all of us rot?
I liked this movie a lot. A lot to think about, and more complicated with hidden meanings. Very interesting.
No, she doesn't get scared to death.
A subplot in the movie is that there is black mold growing in the house, especially the open hole in the wall (notice that she dies while gasping for air next to this hole).
She brings it up with the executor of the old woman's estate, saying something along the lines "she's old and her respiratory health is poor", but he ignores her and does not fix the problem.
She basically dies from respiratory failure caused by the black mold.
My take was that she had a heart attack brought on by the weight of seeing Polly.
This was foreshadowed near the beginning when she was on the phone and said that she was going to give herself a heart attack and by her multiple references to being prone to frighten easily.
She didn't die. She actually slipped into a coma, induced by extreme boredom. Just like most people who watched this snorefest.
share