Spoilers ahead: this review discusses the film’s central revelation and ending.
Sometimes the problem isn’t that your house is haunted. It’s that somebody else is already living there.
I was browsing Netflix’s Netflix & Chills Halloween collection, looking for something to watch without committing myself to another full-blown horror marathon, when I landed on Within, a 2016 film also known as Crawlspace. The premise sounded familiar enough: a family moves into a new house, things start going bump in the night, and before long everybody is questioning whether they should have bothered unpacking in the first place.
What caught my attention was Erin Moriarty. I recognised her from The Boys, where she plays Annie January, better known as Starlight. Seeing her in an earlier horror film was enough to make me curious, although I wasn’t expecting very much beyond a reasonably entertaining evening of haunted-house clichés.
For a good part of its running time, that’s exactly what Within appears to be. Objects move for no apparent reason, noises come from places where nobody should be, and the family experiences the usual collection of supernatural warning signs. I was already preparing myself for another restless spirit with unfinished business. Then the film takes a turn: there isn’t a ghost, demon or curse. There’s someone living inside the house, hidden in the spaces between the walls, watching the occupants and emerging whenever they aren’t looking.
That’s when I started finding it genuinely unsettling. I’ve seen enough supernatural horror to accept ghosts as part of the arrangement; once the dead start moving furniture, the ordinary rules have already been suspended. But somebody physically occupying your house without your knowledge, eating your food, entering your bedroom and watching you sleep? That’s an entirely different sort of violation. The film takes a little too long to reveal its hand, and not everything works once it does, but its central idea stayed with me: the living can be much more frightening than the dead.
The House That Was Too Good to Be True
The story centres on John Alexander (Michael Vartan), his teenage daughter Hannah (Erin Moriarty), and John’s new wife Melanie (Nadine Velazquez). They move into a spacious suburban house hoping for a fresh start, which in horror films is generally a sign that things are about to become considerably worse. John is a widower, Hannah is still adjusting to her father’s new marriage, and Melanie is trying to establish herself within a family that already has its own emotional history.
The house comes with an inconvenient past. Members of a previous family were found dead in what was reported as a murder-suicide, while more recent occupants left under suspicious circumstances. John knew at least part of the property’s history and elected not to tell the others before the move. An interesting decision, particularly when you’re trying to persuade your daughter that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the place.
The disturbances follow familiar patterns. A picture falls from a wall, a Newton’s cradle starts moving, furniture seems to shift, food disappears from the refrigerator, and Hannah’s cat Monty notices something is wrong long before the people do. If you’ve watched Poltergeist, The Amityville Horror or The Conjuring, much of this will look familiar, but the pleasure is in how ordinary the explanations eventually become. A moving chair and a missing takeaway meal do not need a supernatural cause.
Erin Moriarty and the Daughter Nobody Believes
Hannah is the most engaging character, largely because Moriarty gives her enough personality to carry an otherwise conventional part. She isn’t particularly pleased about the move, misses the life she’s left behind and finds her relationship with her father increasingly strained. John interprets much of her behaviour as teenage rebellion, although his scepticism becomes difficult to excuse once the strange events begin accumulating.
Moriarty was still several years away from becoming widely associated with The Boys, and it’s interesting to see her handling a different kind of vulnerable protagonist. Her performance mixes irritation, curiosity and unease without making Hannah a conveniently flawless investigator. She can be impulsive and dismissive, but she’s also the only member of the household making any serious effort to understand what’s happening.
Her boyfriend Tommy (Blake Jenner) offers a connection to her old life, though his usefulness becomes rather limited as the story progresses. Much of the family drama follows the same frustrating pattern: daughter sees something frightening, father tells her she’s imagining it, and the audience wonders how much more evidence is required before somebody takes her seriously. When Hannah starts looking through the belongings left by earlier occupants and investigating the history of the property, the film becomes more interesting because she finally has something concrete to follow.
A Creepy Neighbour and a Useful Distraction
One of the film’s more effective pieces of misdirection involves Ray Walsh (Ronnie Gene Blevins), the neighbourhood locksmith. Ray seems to have very little understanding of personal boundaries. He offers to replace the locks, behaves inappropriately around Hannah and generally conducts himself like a man you’d rather not invite inside. The film practically waves a sign over his head announcing that he must be responsible for the disturbances.
To be fair, Ray is genuinely threatening. His interest in Hannah is intrusive, his behaviour is disturbing, and his job gives him a particularly unpleasant advantage in a story about domestic security. When he becomes confrontational after John chooses another locksmith, his status as the obvious suspect only grows. Yet Within is playing a nastier game. Ray isn’t the person causing the apparently paranormal activity.
When Ray breaks into the house and meets the actual intruder, his role changes abruptly from menacing neighbour to victim. It’s a memorable bit of misdirection because the audience has been trained to fear the wrong man. There may be several threats to a family’s safety, the film suggests, and none of them requires supernatural assistance.
The Man Behind the Walls
The central revelation involves David (Dorian Kingi), who has been living within the very structure of the house. Hannah’s investigation uncovers the existence of a son omitted from the public account of the earlier family tragedy. David is associated with violent behaviour, and the film links his prolonged confinement to agoraphobia. He was responsible for the original killings and has continued to occupy the property unseen while new residents arrive and depart.
There is a grotesque logic to his existence. The house is not merely somewhere he hides; it has become his entire world. The attic, concealed passages, ventilation areas and cupboards form a private network of observation and access. When the family sleeps, he moves. When they leave, he eats. When they hear something suspicious, he retreats into places they don’t know exist. In a strange reversal of the home-invasion formula, the legal owners are the newcomers and the violent intruder is already established in what he considers his territory.
Kingi’s physical presence gives David an uncomfortable quality, but the screenplay doesn’t give him much psychological depth. More troublingly, it uses a mental-health diagnosis as shorthand for dangerousness, as though agoraphobia explains homicidal behaviour. It doesn’t. David ultimately functions as a human monster rather than a convincingly developed person, and I think the story loses something by taking that easy route.
Even so, the essential idea works. David doesn’t need to break a window or pick a lock, because he’s already inside. He knows who these people are, watches their habits and understands their vulnerabilities. A ghost moving furniture is one thing; a living person making deliberate decisions while you’re asleep is considerably worse.
When the Haunted-House Tricks Start Making Sense
I particularly liked how the film repurposes the vocabulary of supernatural horror. A missing item, a cupboard left open or a noise in the ceiling initially seems to indicate something paranormal. All these clues acquire perfectly physical explanations when we discover that the house is inhabited by someone the family cannot see. It’s this retrospective change in meaning, rather than any single jump scare, that makes the film effective.
The most unsettling detail is how thoroughly David has studied his environment. Doors and alarms protect the perimeter, but they’re almost useless when the danger is already on the other side. The family believes that the house belongs exclusively to them, while David can move through concealed spaces in a way they haven’t even considered. They aren’t really in control of their home, whatever the property documents say.
That reversal also explains why the film’s original title, Crawlspace, feels a little too revealing. It tells you where to direct your suspicions. Within leaves the meaning open longer: a threat within the building, within the family environment, and within the ordinary assumptions people make about safety.
The Ending: Safety Was Never Really an Option
The final act abandons much of the restraint of the first half and becomes a fairly brutal survival thriller. Hannah begins piecing together what happened to the earlier family, but her new understanding provides little protection. David has spent years learning his environment, while the Alexanders are still working out where the attic access leads and what lies behind the walls.
The police eventually arrive during a confrontation. They shoot someone they believe to be the attacker, creating the impression that the nightmare has ended. Only later do we discover the awful mistake: the person killed was Tommy, who had already fallen victim to David. The actual intruder is still alive, still hidden within the house, and still capable of reaching everyone who thinks they’ve been saved.
The violence that follows is surprisingly uncompromising. Melanie is killed; John is strangled; Hannah struggles through concealed passageways while trying to reach an exit. The film ends with David overpowering her, and her scream carries over an exterior view of the house. Her death is strongly implied rather than shown in an unambiguous aftermath. For the person who spent the film trying to persuade everyone that something was wrong, it is a bleak end.
I’m not convinced the ending needs to be quite so relentlessly cruel. Horror films don’t owe their protagonists a happy outcome, but there’s a difference between earned tragedy and a screenplay determined to kill everybody. Some of the escape attempts and character decisions are contrived. Still, the refusal to provide an easy resolution fits the film’s central premise: once the intruder knows the house better than its occupants do, there is no obvious safe place left.
The Curious Claim About 2008
After the violence, Within displays a caption linking the economic downturn of 2008 to an apparent increase in people discovering strangers living undetected inside their homes. I found the claim almost as interesting as the film. There is a real phenomenon commonly called phrogging, which involves somebody secretly occupying another person’s home without the residents knowing. It’s different from conventional squatting in an empty or abandoned building, although the terms sometimes get mixed up.
Documented cases exist. Daniel LaPlante terrified a Massachusetts family in the 1980s after hiding in concealed parts of their home; a widely reported Japanese case from 2008 involved a woman secretly living inside an occupied house and emerging to take food. Neither incident proves a surge in phrogging caused by the global financial crisis, however, and I couldn’t establish a reliable statistical basis for the film’s specific claim about a staggering increase.
The caption functions better as a final horror-film nudge than as something to repeat as fact. A few disturbing incidents are not evidence of a nationwide trend. They don’t have to be common to be frightening, though. Most of us take the boundaries of our homes for granted. We know who lives there, who has keys and which rooms are occupied. The possibility that another person exists quietly inside that system makes the whole arrangement feel less secure.
Design, Cinematography and the Architecture of Unease
From a visual standpoint, Within is competent rather than particularly distinctive, although its design has more to do with the scares than it might first appear. The apparently ordinary suburban home is essential to the deception: familiar rooms, cupboards, passageways, a garage and attic. Production designer Ermanno Di Febo-Orsini and cinematographer James Kniest use the contrast between comfortable domestic surfaces and the dark unfinished structure behind them to good effect.
I appreciate that the story understands a house isn’t simply a collection of visible rooms. Behind the painted walls is a whole network of framing, services, voids and access points most residents barely think about. Once the intruder’s movements are revealed, these details become the film’s real geography. Ordinary household architecture suddenly looks less reassuring, particularly when a doorway or vent might provide an entrance from somewhere you cannot see.
The lighting grows darker and the spaces more claustrophobic as the film progresses, although some scenes become almost unnecessarily difficult to make out. Its best images are of places that should be empty but no longer feel empty. I wouldn’t put the photography alongside the strongest horror films of the decade, but the setting works because so much of it is deliberately unremarkable.
The Sound of Someone Else in the House
Benjamin Wallfisch composed the score, but I found the sound design more immediately effective than the music. A scrape in the ceiling, something shifting behind a cupboard, a knock in an adjacent room: these little domestic noises carry much of the tension. The score reinforces the thriller atmosphere without leaving behind a particularly distinctive musical identity.
When you live somewhere long enough, you become familiar with its noises. You know which doors creak, which pipes knock and how the building sounds when everybody else is asleep. The film exploits the possibility that some of those sounds aren’t the house settling after all. They might be someone moving, making sure you can’t quite tell where they are.
Gary Dauberman and the Familiar Machinery of Modern Horror
Within was directed by Phil Claydon from an original screenplay by Gary Dauberman, whose name later became closely associated with the Conjuring universe and the It adaptations. Dauberman understands the machinery of commercial horror: establish a vulnerable family, introduce inexplicable disturbances, provide a plausible suspect and gradually reveal a concealed threat.
The film has some familiar studio-horror DNA. New Line Cinema and the Safran Company were involved, and the story shares the domestic unease of other 2010s haunted-house releases. JoBeth Williams, who famously played Diane Freeling in Poltergeist (1982), appears as neighbour Rosemary Fletcher. Whether intended as a deliberate nod or simply an interesting casting connection, I rather liked seeing her in another story about a family whose home is not what it appears.
There isn’t a source novel to explore here; the story comes from Dauberman’s screenplay. I suspect its missed opportunity is not the reveal itself but the relatively short amount of time spent exploring what follows. How did David remain hidden for so long? How was he supplied? How did he adapt to successive families? A more patient film might have made the logistics of secret habitation just as unsettling as the violent final act.
The Trouble With Being Watched
One aspect of the film that sits less comfortably with me is the treatment of Hannah as an object of surveillance. Both Ray and David violate her personal space, and David’s obsessive observation is central to the horror. The story understands that being watched without your knowledge is frightening, but at times the direction seems a little too interested in Hannah’s vulnerability rather than what that invasiveness says about control and privacy.
The film has an opportunity to explore surveillance as something more than a device for putting a young woman in danger. Instead, it leans heavily on the familiar spectacle of a female character being watched, threatened and pursued. Moriarty gives Hannah more personality than the script fully supports, and I wish the film trusted her perspective enough to do something more interesting with it.
What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why I Kept Watching
For me, the biggest weakness is the pacing. The early section is so familiar that I found myself waiting for the film to get to the point. There are only so many inexplicable noises, suspicious looks and moving objects one can watch before wanting a better explanation. Some of the family decisions are similarly frustrating: John dismisses far too much evidence, Melanie gets too little room to develop, and supporting characters sometimes feel like clues or victims rather than people.
Yet I can’t dismiss it. Ray’s misdirection works, the use of architectural hiding places is clever, and the knowledge that the family was never alone gives the earlier scenes an uncomfortable second meaning. It’s not an especially original film in execution, and the ending goes too far towards mechanical cruelty, but it delivers a handful of effective scares. What initially seems supernatural turns out to be entirely physical, and somehow that makes everything worse.
The Horror That Doesn’t Need a Supernatural Explanation
I went into Within because I wanted an uncomplicated Halloween film and happened to recognise Erin Moriarty. For a while it looked like another ordinary story about a family discovering that their new home comes with a few unwelcome extras. By the end, the most interesting part was not the supposed haunting but the idea of another human being quietly inhabiting the same space without anyone realising.
Ghost stories depend on the unknown. We fear what exists beyond death, what we can’t explain and whatever might be lurking outside our understanding. Within suggests something considerably simpler. You hear a noise in the ceiling. Something is missing from the fridge. A door has moved. You tell yourself it’s the wind, the pipes or perhaps the cat. Somewhere behind the wall, a person who has been listening to you for weeks waits until you go back to sleep.
It’s an uneven horror thriller, no question, and I don’t think it quite makes the most of its premise. But the central idea works without a single supernatural explanation. I think I’ll take my chances with the ghosts.
My rating: 3/5 stars — 6/10. An occasionally effective home-invasion horror film made more disturbing by the fact that its central idea doesn’t require anything supernatural.
Image credits: film stills from Within (2016), © Warner Bros. Entertainment / New Line Cinema. Used here for film criticism and commentary. Contains full spoilers.
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