Pretty Girls

Lydia awakens in Paul’s trunk to find that every means of escape has been accounted for; there are steel plates installed so she cannot punch through a taillight or back seat, and she is bruised and tightly bound. She thinks back to the pressures put on her and Claire once Julia was taken, and to her failures to remain sober. Her resolve weakens when she realizes she is helpless and must rely on Claire to come to her rescue. She does not have much faith that Claire will muster the energy to rescue her.

Claire feels despondent after answering three of Paul’s timed phone calls. She theorizes that Paul sent the burglars as a distraction and that there is crucial information on the USB that Paul desperately needs. She goes back inside the Fuller house and notices that the garage’s architectural and construction features look similar to Paul’s setup at home. She counts a dozen 20-terabyte storage drives chained on a shelf, filled with more movies. The torture weapons and leather mask hang from the walls. She had assumed that the rogue credit card charges on Paul’s card were payoffs to Johnny Jackson, but she wonders if more people are involved in the scheme.

She finds a computer and searches for Darryl Lassiter, the man identified as Julia’s murderer, but she learns the man is Black. Since the masked man in the snuff films is white, Darryl cannot be the murderer. Claire searches deeper and finds unedited footage of the garage. Upon opening these files, she positively identifies Paul as the masked killer by the moles on his shoulder and the phrase he used when he tried to rape Lydia (“tell me you want this”). When Paul calls again, Claire takes charge, telling him she expects a picture of Lydia, unharmed, every 20 minutes while she leaves to retrieve the USB from a hidden location.

In Sam’s next letter to Julia, he apologizes for messy handwriting because of a recent stroke. He lines out the evidence he has collected: that Gerald Scott took illicit images of women, and that Paul might be aware of that fact. In trying to describe how rotten Paul is, Sam draws a comparison to Julia’s first boyfriend, an awkward 16-year-old boy with a bad haircut and a job at McDonald’s. Sam was wary of his daughter going out alone with a hormone-riddled boy, but that was relatively harmless compared to Paul’s deliberate scheming arrogance. These worries expand when Sam receives a phone call from Paul on the guise of checking on his health. In truth, Paul uses the phone call to seek approval to marry Claire. Sam declines, saying he cannot give away another daughter until he learns what happened to Julia. Sam can tell something suspicious is afoot, and he swears he will confront Paul until he gets all the answers.

Claire drives to get the USB in exchange for her sister. She has received several photos of Lydia in the trunk of a car, so she clings to the idea that her sister is still alive. She wonders if any others are involved in Paul’s scheme, like Adam, with whom Claire slept on occasion. Claire believes she has the upper hand because Paul still cares about her in his twisted way; after punching her unconscious, he laid a pillow underneath her head and returned her wedding ring to her finger. She believes she exploit this rotten devotion to save Lydia.

After pulling onto Lydia’s street, Claire unearths the buried gun. Even though she hates guns, she thinks she can surprise Paul by pointing one at him with just enough time to shoot him in the face. Rick interrupts her, worried about the gun in her hands and suspicious of Lydia’s absence. To avoid scaring Rick, Claire lies and says that Lydia broke her sobriety, implying that she is taking the gun for Lydia’s own safety. Rick questions her, and she admits that he should take Dee far away for a while because the FBI and police are involved in something insidious. Later, Claire is pulled over by a cop car; she panics and calls Helen, asking for help for the first time in many years.

Still in the trunk, Lydia feels her mental faculties fade and realizes the trunk has been outfitted to release nitrous oxide to sedate her. Eventually she is released, zip-tied and hooded, and marched through what she thinks is a forest. Eventually, Paul ties her to a metal chair against a wall, but the hood is so thick she can’t peek through. She can hear birds chirping and wind whistling in the background, but nothing else.

Paul teases Lydia physically and emotionally by forcing her knees open and telling her how easy it was to track Claire using her iPhone. Paul saw that Claire went to Rick, and he goads Lydia on by talking about Dee’s physical similarity to Julia. Paul reveals that Claire wasn’t his first choice of wife—Lydia was, until he saw her addiction and depression problems, which irked his tidy nature. He switched to pursuing Claire as soon as they met in college, as she was an easier target for him to lure, having been mostly emotionally abandoned by her aggrieved family. He taunts Lydia with the knowledge of Julia’s final resting place and waterboards her with his own urine. He drinks filtered water to have a constant supply. Finally, when Lydia begs him to rape her already, he removes the hood to reveal that they are back at the Fuller house. The ambient forest sounds were just a ruse.