THE PARENTING 2024 | RECAP | MOVIE REVIEW | ENDING EXPLAINED
The movie starts in a big rural mansion type of house in 1983, where we see Donna, a single mother weeping for the end of the hit series Mash. She has two teenagers Allie and Jamie, who were typical ‘80s teens. Donna bangs on Allie’s door to ask her to have her dinner but Allie doesn't answer. Hence she asks Jamie to bring her down but he being a jerk refuses. As Donna starts to plead with him, some unknown entity drags her to the basement in a surprise attack. As her scream fills the house, Jamie climbs down to the basement in search of her. There he sees Donna's dead body and the entity. He screams Allie's name in horror, but before he can escape, the entity finishes him as well. Allie finally emerged from her room, she looked horrified, and soon the wallpaper around her started collapsing. In the background, we hear someone's voice asking her what's she seeing. As the entity started moving towards her, she tried to rush back into her room, but strangely it was locked from inside. Allie's voice of death echoed around the house.
Now the story shifts to the present day. We see Rohan and Josh, two gay guys in a sort of relationship heading towards the same house with their dog Katie. They were officially introducing their parents to each other and were super pumped about this. The house is now fully renovated with a lady by the name of Brenda taking care of it on behalf of its owners. She is running it like an Airbnb and these guys were her first customers. Here she lies about the 80's incident and terms it a fire accident with death. She shows the house to these guys, hands them over the keys, emergency number and wifi password. Surprisingly wi-fi password was weird like Ego Sun Tibi Andreas. Just as she left these horney guys wanted to do a quick thing but Rohan got a call, from their mutual friend Sara. He walks out to take the call. Here Sara tries to stop Rohan from proposing to Josh in a haze as she believes Rohan is not yet ready. Rohan and Sara argue over this a little. Just then Rohan and Josh saw Branda emerging from the bush with a trunk in her hand doing some weird stuff. She made an excuse of measuring the land for some construction works but it was super weird. Sara by mistake sent the text to Josh telling him not to propose to him, which ruined the whole surprise thing. Josh is instantly super pumped about this as he is not expecting it. Later Rohan's adoptive parents Frank and Sharon arrived here, they met Josh and all settled in. Rohan was visibly nervous here as he didn't know how his parent would take all this. He lied to Frank about Josh's job as a worker in REI company with a moonlighting of songwriting.
After some time, Josh's parents Liddy and Cliff arrived with their three dogs Frick, Frack and F-bomb. These guys seemed super cool and funny compared to Frank and Sharon who were a bit reserved. Here we see the miniature model of the house in a glass jar, with someone shaking it really well.
Suddenly outside the mansion, it started snowing. Even though the season was not of snow yet it's started snowing. Inside the house Liddy and Sharon started chatting, Liddy says, Cliff is a high school math teacher and she was a receptionist in the school. Both met at the school. Sharon in reply says she is a retired psychologist and Frank an architect. Liddy revealed Josh's loss of job in May and how Rohan was super helpful during that period. Rohan and Josh were dumb-faced hearing this as they had lied to Sharon about Josh's job earlier. Josh also apologizes to Sharon and says he is a full-time songwriter, he tries to impress her by singing a song which was super dumb.
Josh in a state of sadness texts Sara his feelings. Then takes a bunch of sleeping gummies to take the edge off, even though Rohan had forbidden him. This makes him suddenly all sleepy at the dinner table and to impress the guests, he asks Alexa to play a song. But the wi-fi was not working. So he started to sing out loud himself, to his surprise Frank enjoyed it, he joined him and suddenly all started enjoying. Just then he found the wi-fi password in his pocket, as he read it out loud, a dirty horrifying hand from under the table pulled his leg. Seeing this he jumped from his seat as if he had a shock of 420 wolts. He tries to rationalise things but his gummies fall from his pockets, which upsets Rohan. As all settled in their room for the night, Sharon was not at all impressed. Frank was worried more about the wi-fi not working than about his son's boyfriend. Rohan too was upset as his perfect parent meet planning was now on haywire. All of a sudden a loud banging sound starts to echo around the room, Sharon and Frank think Liddy and Cliff are making it out, while Liddy and Ckiff think it's the other way around. But in reality, there was a zombie lady in the house who was banging her head on the wall. After some time the sound stops and starts again. Josh jokes it as round two.
Later at night Sara, rang the bell at the main door as she had arrived uninvited to help these guys. She gets a couch to sleep on, and when she gets the wi fi password she asks why it's in Latin. Apparently, the password was in Latin with the meaning I give you myself, Andras. Frank didn't get sleep so he tried to enter the password with different combinations. It didn't work. Instead, he heard a voice calling his name and he followed it to the basement. There he saw a demon-like figure, instead of freaking out he uttered the password.
The next morning Sara made a dashing entry to introduce herself to everyone. As everyone started breakfast, Josh asked for a knife. Frank instead of passing out a bread knife, picked up a butcher knife and all of a sudden cut Josh's wrist. This freaked everyone out, even Frank. Sharon in panic asked him how did he that then Frank out of control again made a cut on Josh's shoulder to illustrate. The Frick, Frack and F-bomb dogs started barking in rage seeing this so did Rohan as clearly Frank was not ok. Then suddenly to silence the dog Franks shouts out so loud that all the furniture at the house starts to shake and one heavy cubord falls on one dog. It dies on the spot and everyone sees it in horror. Sharon now took him to his room while others wondered what the hell was happening. Rohan tries to placate Josh and Sara tries to call a hospital but signals are not working. Basically, these guys were cut off from the outside. After some time, Frank arrives butt naked uttering all kinds of words. He name-calls Josh and suddenly vomits a ton of stuff like he had eaten a feast. Clearly, he was medically not ok. F-bomb eats his vomits which Liddy sees and shoes it off. Then we see the dog's eyes turning red implying something demonic is going on. Mainly Frank is possessed.
As Sara starts to stitch Josh's wound he and Rohan again argue which gets a little heated. Rohan in frustration gets out of the house, the snowfall is heavy and already covered the cars. In frustration, he threw away the ring which he had bought to propose to Josh. Inside the house we see Frank getting worse, it's clear that he is possessed and for the first time we see the entity in his form who says, I Am slowly getting you, you are dead already no point in fighting me. We see Frank resisting it but the entity was slowly and steadily possessing him.
After cooling down for a few minutes Rohan understood his mistake and started to patch up with Josh, who was in no more to listen. Right then both of these guys saw the zombie lady again and freaked out. The zombie lady crawled backwards and grabbed Josh's hand in a sudden attack which made him scream like hell. Rohan too saw this and screamed like hell. Hearing the screams of these guys Liddy Rashid in to switch on the lights, as soon as she did it the zombie lady vanished. We see Sara in the basement searching for a shovel, she got an old Box with photos of Donna and her family. Right there another zombie appeared this time it was a teenager who was trying to grab her, she too panicked and ran back upstairs. Clearly, all of these guys were freaked out and understood something was not right in this house.
Sara had brought the box with her which had a book on demonology. On its first page, someone has written a message to Alie saying, she had found the solution to their problem and it is on page 85. Sharon starts reading it. It talks about a demon called Andreas, who is a controller of storms and master of possession. He has the body of a man and the head of our Revan. He will take a human host to make an entry into our world. So he must be kept inside the protective circle. Cliff says this house is surrounded by circles which is strange. All this demon talk freaks Josh who says Frank must be possessed and we must contain him. Sharon gets angry hearing this as for her it all seems nonsense. She gets angry towards Josh and a heated argument erupts between the two, which results in her getting out of getting out of there with a bowl of noodles.
Frank was taking a bath in his room, So Sharon waits on the chair and gets sleepy. She gets a weird dream in which Frank says I love you, I love Rohan too and ask her to kill him politely. She suddenly awake hearing this, strangely the bowl of noodles she bought was empty. There was a message on the. Seeing all this she gets a little scared and starts searching for Frank in the house. We see Frank's body floating in the air and following her which is cool and funny at the same time. As she turned back Frank grabbed her by the neck, in mid-air he started choking her.
Sara and Josh saw this in horror, he dashed towards Frank and punched his back. Sharon fell from this while Frank turned his head by 180 deg to see Rohan, Josh and Sara. From all this, it's clear that Frank is possessed and Sharon is too convinced. Frank started laughing hysterically so Josh again punched him in his face. This time he vomited all his content onto Josh which is too gross to see yet funny. This is a good one. Sharon thanks Josh for saving her, she tries to clean him up. Since he didn't open his mouth he didn't get possessed. Sara and Cliff now stuff stuff infront of Frank's room so that he can't come out. Rohan calls the emergency number Branda had given him, and by the grace of something he gets the network. Later he apologised to Liddy and Cliff about this mishap plan, he just wanted it to be a fun, romantic family moment. Cliff understood his feelings, he went ahead to Josh and handed him his gun which he was forced to bring her by his brother. Sharon and Liddy finally talk like normal old housewives, where Sharon says sorry for being rude towards Josh. She was always strict on Rohan which had made him a litttle introvert. As the two were talking, F-bomb attacked Liddy and grabbed her by her wrist. Sharon tried to beat it with a wooden hammer but it was intense. Finally, Cliff rescued Liddy by smashing the dog.
Now, Sharon saw a beam of light just at the outskirts of the house so Josh and Rohan went ahead to check it out. It turns out to be the house of Branda who welcomes them. Cryptically asks how's your evening going? Have you guys had fun or did you awaken a demon. It turns out it was she who had the miniature version of the mansion. She narrates what's happening. In the 80s she was Allie's friend. Her parents were into the occult and Donna didn't like it. She didn't want Allie to be friends with her. In their joyful teenage years, Branda brought the demonology book from her house to just check it out.
She and Allie drew a protective circle, with some chicken blood and chants they messed around with the book. To their shock demon Andras appeared infront of them in their control. Branda just to check it out asked Andras to get Donna and Jammie. As he did it, the screams of Donna and Jamie freaked Allie she rushed out of the circle to check on them. We saw what happened to her then in the beginning. It was Branda who was in the room the room when Allie died. From that moment onwards, Andras put a voice in her mind and allowed her to leave only to find a suitable body to escape the house. Since then, Branda has been trying for the perfect body. It's not been easy, it had to occur on a warm moon with many subtle instructions. This year was a perfect time and she thought Josh would have been the perfect vessel. But instead, Frank got possessed. She drew a circle around the house so that once Frank crosses it the possession would be permanent. After that Andras would wipe the human race out. Branda would still be alive because of her special relationship with the demon. Also, she liked the occult. Rohan and Josh were dumb-faced hearing all this, how they were lured into a trap. Before these two could get hold of her she escaped. Josh says there is only one way to stop this and that would be to kill Frank inside the circle.
Back at the house, all the snow is magically gone and we see Branda chanting something to bring Frank out. The circle is lit with fire. Rohan and Josh rushed back to the house to save Frank but it was late, he started walking out. Josh dragged Sharon outside while Rohan picked up the gun and book. There he saw the zombie lady again who was no other than Donna. She tried to help but it didn't come out correctly. Now, Rohan hands over the gun to Josh and asks him to shoot him as he now asks Andras to possess him instead of Frank. Andras likes this idea since Rohan is young compared to Frank's old body. He now starts to possess Rohan, Josh instead of shooting him starts to chant as he decides to sacrifice himself instead. Similarly, all parent and Sara starts chanting which confuses Andraes, he gets stuck in between them and gets weaker as time passes. Soon, he appears in his original form all weak.
Frank sees this opportunity to crush him in his leg. Finally, Andraes dies or let's just say went away from where he came. In the end, Josh proposes to Rohan who accepts it. Branda and other sees the ghosts of Donna, Jemmie and Allie, who show the middle finger to Branda before disappearing. Oh yes, the F-bomb dog was alive. Sara intended to send Branda to jail but she she escaped. With this, the movie ends. Even though this experience was horrifying, it brought the family together. In the face of danger, Rohan and Josh came together with their family to support them. If you’re in the mood for a light, silly horror-comedy with a stellar cast having fun, then it’s worth it. Otherwise, it's an average movie. It swings quickly from witty family banter to full-on horror. The scares are rarely genuinely frightening, and the comedy dips into juvenile territory—fart jokes, dick jokes etc.
