Upstairs
2021 · 16m
Directed by Phillip Trow
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Jennifer Saint brings her boyfriend home to meet her family, who have long campaigned to make her believe she is mentally unstable, and she finally receives validation that she is not delusional when her late father reaches out from beyond the grave to confirm their dark family secret.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a film that weaponizes gaslighting and then flips it by making the supernatural the *only* honest thing in the room. Everyone else would've played this straight as a haunted-house redemption arc, but Trow knows the real horror is family, and the ghost is just the messenger.
Trow demonstrates formal command of the unreliable-narrator tradition—the staging and editing work in concert to collapse Jennifer's subjective reality and objective truth until they're indistinguishable, a technique that traces through decades of psychological thriller craft.
The decision to make the father's intervention feel neither comforting nor condemning—just factual and deeply sad—is what transforms this from genre exercise into something genuinely unsettling; it's a tonal precision that costs nothing but changes everything.