Synopsis/Details
KAREN HALEY, 32, is a claims investigator — professionally suspicious, personally armored. WILL STEVENS, 34, builds monsters for a living at a fading costume-and-effects warehouse. They met when he asked her out while wearing a nine-foot dragon suit. Two years on, he still cannot come to her door as himself. There is a reason. Will’s mother has advanced dementia and does not recognize him — but she lights up for a character voice. He learned at nineteen that becoming someone else is how you get let in, and he has never unlearned it. Karen learned the opposite lesson from the opposite direction: her father was a charming, lifelong liar, and she has built an entire adult personality out of never being fooled again. Meanwhile, someone is working the neighborhood — eleven burglaries in five months. His method is a hi-vis vest, a clipboard, and a story. He is a man in a costume too, and the film never lets us forget it. A prank goes badly wrong; Karen ends up bleeding on her own hallway floor while a giant spider apologizes to her. They separate. They come back together the hard way, by saying true things at a kitchen table with nothing in their hands. Will agrees to one rule: no more surprises at her door. Nine days later she opens it anyway, because the doorbell rang and she assumed. Will’s rescue succeeds — the intruder runs — and then the real police arrive and Will is arrested on his girlfriend’s lawn in a costume. DETECTIVE MARISOL ORTIZ explains, correctly and unforgettably, why that word at a door has to mean something. But Will spent twenty seconds looking at the man, and Will has spent twenty years learning to build a human being out of a glance. He gives Ortiz the only usable description in eleven cases: the shoulder that rides high, the weight forward on the feet, an old splash burn on the left forearm. A week later the thief tries a house two blocks away, and this time nobody plays hero. A 74-year-old neighbor with a small furious dog makes the call, Karen dials the detective instead of driving over, and the police make the arrest. In a lineup, Karen cannot identify a man she never saw unmasked — and says so. Will identifies him by the way he walks. Will pleads to a misdemeanor and serves two hundred hours performing at his mother’s memory-care facility. At the end of it he takes off the costume in front of thirty residents and says his own name, and in the second row his mother applauds a man in a t-shirt. The last scene is the doorway one final time. Will knocks. He is wearing jeans. The thing that opens the door is Karen in a six-foot tarantula costume.
