The Nest (Il nido) (2019)

At night, a man tries to escape with his baby, but the two of them unfortunately have a terrible accident. Many years later, it is revealed that the man is dead and that his son Samuel, now paraplegic, is kept locked away in a villa by his mother, Elena, who raises him strictly and controls every aspect of his life. She also takes care of his education; among other things, she teaches him piano, and she lets anyone else who needs to look after their needs live with them on the estate. The same goes for close friends and relatives. The household’s strict equilibrium is disrupted when, during Samuel’s birthday party, his aunt Carla tells him about things connected to life outside that place. For this, she is punished by Christian, the estate’s doctor, who nearly suffocates her. Aside from this incident, everything seems to go as his mother has decided. Another unexpected development occurs when an old family friend, whom the mother finds herself unable to refuse, asks her to take in his little granddaughter Denise as a new maid. The woman agrees, but forbids the girl from having direct contact with her son, whose education must remain within the strict limits she has set. Despite the ban, the two children gradually begin communicating: Denise introduces Samuel to rock music, which he has never heard because his mother allows him to listen only to classical music, and begins teaching him about the world beyond the estate. She is especially surprised that Samuel does not know how to shoot. His mother disapproves of what is happening and becomes even stricter with her son, forcing him to watch an animal being slaughtered and generally exposing him to other intense experiences. Samuel begins to suspect that something is wrong, especially when he discovers that one of the estate’s farmhands is mute as a result of his mother’s decision to have the doctor subject him to an extreme course of electroconvulsive therapy, because “she didn’t like what he had to say.” After being sent away and kept at a distance from the villa, Denise returns to the estate. The mistress of the house seems to become more accepting of the relationship between the young girl and her son, and allows her back into the villa. Soon afterward, however, the doctor drugs the girl and subjects her to electroshock treatment. The aim, after several sessions, is to make her completely unable to speak or express herself. Filippo, the villa’s handyman, discovers the cruel treatment the girl is being subjected to and challenges the doctor about it, but the doctor is content to carry out the mistress’s orders. The handyman feels sorry for the two children and decides to take them out of the estate the following night. That night, Filippo puts the escape plan into action with the two children: he drugs the mistress, then goes downstairs to the living room and shoots the doctor dead. Meanwhile, the two children get into the van and head for the villa’s gates. When the mistress regains consciousness, she goes downstairs to the living room, where she finds the doctor’s corpse. She realizes what the escape plan is and, in despair, begins to scream. Filippo puts the rifle to his head and kills himself. When they reach the estate’s gate, the two escapees are stopped by the two farmhands. One of them tries to seduce Denise, saying that he has been sexually abstinent for a long time. The girl kills both of them with a firearm. As they get farther from the estate, Samuel notices that their surroundings are not quite what he expected. There was, in fact, a reason Elena had created a completely closed, dictatorial society inside the estate: Denise honks the van’s horn, and at the sound, humanoid creatures like zombies, bearing sores on their bodies like those of the man who arrived at the villa with her, rise from the grass in the surrounding fields. Denise explains to Samuel that they are no longer people and can only be killed with a shot to the head, revealing that human society has been struck by a virus that turns people into zombies. For this reason, Elena had decided to protect herself and her loved ones from the ongoing apocalypse in a drastic way, but one that, in her eyes, was the only possible solution. Her husband, Riccardo, had realized that the situation could not have a positive outcome and had tried to reach another safe place with his son, but one of the mother’s employees had stopped him. As the zombies begin marching toward the van, the girl starts it up again and drives toward a city marked on a map found at the villa, which had belonged to the old family friend who had brought her to the estate. Back at the villa, the mistress, now alone, lies motionless on the floor, her eyes open.