Women and Queerness in Horror: Lyle

Warning: This article contains mentions of child death, pregnancy, childbirth, psychological manipulation, drowning, and spoilers for Lyle.

Heading into this week with the third of my three “queer mama drama” horror pieces, if you will, brings us Stewart Thorndike’s Lyle. This particular film has earned more direct comparisons to a lesbian Rosemary’s Baby, (including by Thorndike herself) and centers on Leah (a spectacular Gaby Hoffmann) and her partner June (Ingrid Jungermann). Together, they seek to begin a new chapter of their lives with a second pregnancy after the birth of their now-toddler daughter, Lyle. This chapter also begins with them moving into a new apartment in Brooklyn.

With a brisk one hour runtime, Lyle does not waste time on getting to the meat of the exposition. Their change of address — only a 15-minute distance from their previous apartment — brings them to a bright and spacious, seemingly perfect Brooklyn brownstone.

Indeed, despite some eccentric behavior from the building manager Karen Trapp (Rebecca Street) which includes a fixation on becoming pregnant despite being post-menopausal that later blossoms into pretending to be pregnant, Leah is quickly enamored with the space. June seems more blasé, but we soon learn that the move is actually tied to June expanding her career as a record producer. This is something on which Leah has compromised and is determined to try and be excited about it.

That compromise is but one of several increasingly obvious fault lines in the relationship, as we soon learn. June, heavily focused on her career, leaves Leah alone for hours at a time to do essentially all the unpacking and childcare. In the backdrop of this growing tension and distance is June’s seeming displeasure or disappointment that Leah is pregnant with another girl; which is something initially brushed aside as a fruitless hope for a son that, without giving too much away just yet, soon enough becomes more complicated.

These long stretches of isolation give the audience plenty of time to grow attached to Leah and Lyle, however. Their relationship is sweetly and believably intimate, which makes for engaging watching in a genre that has sometimes been inflected by male screenwriters framing the horror in a way that comes from a problem in the mother’s behavior or her feelings toward her child. Of course, this makes it all the more emotionally jarring when tragedy strikes. Lyle falls to a seemingly accidental death from an open window while Leah is on a Skype call with her friend Threes (Michael Che).

Lyle then, through a careful montage of the development of Leah and June’s baby, advances the story by about seven months. The fetus developing is voiced over with dialogue from their grief counselor, creating a compellingly uncanny duality between the understanding that their lives are moving forward and the awareness that the transformative experience of being pregnant can be (and is) unsettling in its own right.

It’s worth noting here, indeed, that “mommy horror” led by cisgender men is sometimes reticent to deal with the bizarre, messy physical aspects of what takes place before birth; whether it is out of some frightful fixation on their relative irrelevancy and powerlessness in the birthing process, or a reticence to be seen explicitly linking the feminine and the horrific.

By contrast, although Lyle’s short runtime means we don’t spend as much time with this concept as we otherwise might, there’s a keen awareness of both the beauty and the alien experience of conceiving and growing a human being, along with all the resulting bodily changes that transpire. In essence, Lyle reorients the physicality and frightfulness of Leah’s feminine and motherly experience in a different direction, perhaps in large part due to the near-total absence of men from the story.

As the visuals return to Leah and June’s therapy session, we gain some important insight into how their relationship has shifted in the wake of Lyle’s loss. June is reserved and blames herself for Lyle’s accident. However, Leah displays a fractious, almost desperate brand of optimism, as though if she says “we’re doing really good” enough times and forces herself to smile brightly enough, it’ll become true.

When Leah breaks into uncontrollable laughter during the session as she remembers that June was so disappointed that their second child was a girl, though, it’s increasingly clear that there are some fairly deep-seated cracks in this façade, rightly concerning their therapist. In this way, Lyle begins to set the stage for leaning into and dissecting the familiar horror trope of the “hysterical woman” in some new and interesting ways. It begins to question why this trope exists and how it functions when you remove a man from the picture.

Lo and behold, as soon as they return home, Leah is shaky and subdued, clearly and viscerally uncomfortable being in the site of her loss. On the opposite end of the spectrum, June seems to be making her best effort at accepting their new circumstances and getting on with life. Leah’s thin shell cracks to reveal some lingering panic and paranoia when she discovers a card and flowers from Karen.

She rapidly assumes Karen must have broken in, and ties this assumption to her obsession over how Lyle could have died, when the window through which she fell barely opens a crack from the inside. Over June’s protests, she insists that she wants to move out and that the building “just doesn’t feel right.” June is ultimately able to dissuade her, convincing her it’s implausible if not impossible that Karen would have had any involvement in Lyle’s death.

All is far from resolved, though. Not long after this exchange, Leah receives a call from a close friend of hers and June’s, that June had previously told Leah was responsible for tipping them off to the rental opening at the brownstone. When said friend categorically denies having any involvement, Leah scrambles for an excuse that she must have misremembered, all while clearly realizing that June lied to her. Between June’s lie, her own paranoia, and increasingly unusual behavior from Karen downstairs, Leah turns to online research into the building.

It doesn’t take long at all before she finds that the apartment is listed on a site called “Brooklyn Death Houses,” and that two young boys had previously died in the building. This knowledge comes despite Karen having previously told Leah that theirs would be the first children to take up residence there. From the audience’s perspective, the website seems like any other cheap wannabe-creepypasta, but the already isolated, paranoid, and grieving Leah is deeply vulnerable to its suggestion.

Being alone with this information drives a further wedge into Leah’s relationship with June. It ultimately steers Leah into the upstairs apartment of one of the models that reside in the building, Taylor (Kim Allen). While we had seen Leah experience some kind of unspoken, superficial attraction to her in the early moments of the film, this is the first time we’ve seen them have any extended spoken interaction.

Taylor appears to be warmly receptive and supportive, and though it’s clear there’s a simmering attraction between the two, Taylor does seem to be an ally. She is willing to listen to Leah’s fears and affirm what she’s feeling, even as Leah divulges her fears about the children who had previously died in the building. Eventually, though, the budding intimacy grows too close for Leah’s comfort, and she makes her anxious excuses and leaves, clearly unsettled. Though she is not so much unsettled by her attraction to Taylor as her inability to discern whether or not Leah can allow herself to trust her.

As Leah makes her hurried exit, she invites Taylor to a party-slash-baby shower that she and June plan to host at their apartment, perhaps out of some sense of polite obligation. When the party takes place, however, Leah is clearly still struggling to find her balance, deeply unnerved when two of her friends (themselves musicians) complain that their dual contract nets them the same salary as Threes’ solo act, quipping that the industry is crafting contracts that pick up “two girls for the price of one guy.”

This seemingly innocuous remark further feeds Leah’s growing paranoia, which blossoms into full bloom when Taylor drops by and mentions — seemingly out of concern for Leah’s well-being — that she just remembered she did see a ladder outside the window from which Lyle fell, on the day of her death.

Leah, panicking, turns to tearfully confront Karen, insisting that she knew about the two boys who had died in the building and accusing her of involvement in Lyle’s death. While Karen denies knowledge of any such events, the damage is seemingly done — Leah has fallen into the horror genre’s “hysterical woman” trap. As a result, Leah begins to call into question whether Taylor is really an ally after all, or if she orchestrated the blow-up to further isolate Leah.

The following day, though, Leah and June come by Karen’s apartment to apologize for what they have concluded must have been a panicked misunderstanding. Karen — perhaps to her credit — is very understanding and forgiving. She is patient with the fear and grief Leah is experiencing; or, at least, it seems that way until she hammers the final nail into that very same fear. She begins alluding almost casually to the idea that perhaps the boys that died were part of some Satanic pact involving the families’ firstborn sons, and questioning what would happen if you made such a pact but only had girls.

It does bear mentioning that this scene might feel a little ham-fisted — most viewers will probably have drawn this conclusion already when Leah’s internal alarm bells rang over “two girls for the price of one guy” — but all the same, Leah and June make a quick but polite exit and the film’s denouement is set solidly into motion.

Not long afterward, Leah pays a second visit to Taylor’s apartment upstairs, anxiously talking around her new and increasingly convincing theory until she comes across some older photos of Taylor. In each photo, Taylor’s face is either obscured by her hair, hand, or is inexplicably blurry. At first, Leah seems to believe Taylor’s story that she didn’t like to look at herself as a child, until she finds a blurry-faced photo of Taylor, seemingly taken several years ago outside the same apartment building in which they live now.

Putting two and two together that Taylor also may be manipulating her, Leah once again flees. However, she begins to experience labor pains on her way down the stairs and rushes into her apartment. Threes, who has remained behind to help clean up after the baby shower, greets her warmly until he realizes something is wrong. He helps as best he can as Leah fails to reach June on the phone, but Leah, in pain as much as in full-blown panic, rushes to the mantelpiece and finds a photo of June’s school class from when she was a child. Lo and behold, in the back row, is a blurry-faced Taylor.

Lyle doesn’t explicitly explain the relationship any further than that, but the implication from Leah’s resulting panic is clear as she insists to Threes that Taylor is involved in the plans to harm her and her children. Threes attempts to reassure her that “Taylor can’t get to her in here,” but in so doing slips up and reveals his own complicity in the plan, as Leah never mentioned her by name to him.

Almost reflexively, Leah hits Threes over the back of the head with a ceramic mug and attempts to make a run for it down the street to find anyone who might be able to help her. Just as she reaches someone who might be able to help, however, she is hemmed in by Karen and June. Just as she passes out in June’s arms, she is brought back into the apartment and set down in a previously-arranged birthing pool.

There, the conspiracy reaches its peak, as Leah is surrounded by threats, perceived or otherwise. She pleadingly confronts June, begging her to spare their daughter, but June insists that “this is for us,” and that she’s doing what’s best for the two of them. Finally, the thread that has permeated the entire movie comes to bear; where Leah’s driving character flaw had been her compromising on herself and her needs for a relationship already badly fraying, June had been driven by the question of how far one might be willing to go to be a fully realized artist in a male-dominated profession.

While the line between reality and Leah’s panicked beliefs is (at this point) a deliberately uncertain one, June’s purported motivation becomes clear — and, to Lyle’s great credit, it has absolutely nothing to do with her sexuality. Rather, it has everything to do with an ultimately damning but nonetheless almost understandable desperation to succeed, to matter, to be accepted and recognized in her career of choice.

Nonetheless, Leah is able to persuade June to make the other members of the pact leave the room, under the pretext of trusting June to do what’s right for them. Once alone at last, Leah manages to maneuver the situation to her advantage, by drawing June into the birthing pool with her and ultimately drowning her.

For one terrible, lurching moment, everything is still, and you think both women have drowned — and then Leah emerges from the water, gasping, drenched and terrified, but painfully alive while continuing to give birth to her daughter on her own. In this way, mother and daughter not only survive the story, but are redefined in their emergence from a site of trauma, mistreatment, and loss. It is an ending that is not happy per se but nonetheless feels curiously, unexpectedly affirming.

Ultimately, while the initial inspiration for Lyle may not be especially kind — its central conceit occurred to Thorndike during a conflict with her then-girlfriend Ingrid Jungermann when Thorndike wanted children and Jungermann did not — it does speak to something both honestly human and recognizable to horror fans despite the possibly supernatural elements. Flaws and cracks in a relationship opening up under pressure when a couple, one of whom is pregnant, moves to a new location for the benefit of only one partner’s career is a familiar concept when it comes to straight couples in horror. 13 Cameras and Girl on the Third Floor come to mind, for instance.

Borrowing from these same narrative threads and applying them seamlessly to a lesbian couple is an unexpectedly welcome step in the ongoing move toward normalization. Indeed, there’s even something refreshing about the willingness to explore a relationship between women that has its challenges.

A relationship in which the characters might not be behaving as they should for a healthy relationship and co-parenthood, without those challenges being about the fact that it’s a relationship between women. By centering the horror not on Leah and June’s queerness but rather on their respective (very human) flaws and behaviors, Lyle renders their sexuality the most normal and least threatening thing in the movie.

The fear in the story comes from isolation, inability to communicate, and clashing desires and goals, foibles that could trouble and ultimately sink any relationship. While all of these elements are heavily strained through the perhaps ambiguous presence of something supernatural and malicious, Lyle is never about how difficult or “wrong” it is that these women are lesbians.

Lyle leaves us with Leah and her newborn both emerging from the birthing pool, with a renewed (albeit uncertain) future ahead of them. Although I think Lyle would have benefited from a longer runtime to really solidify who Leah and June were to each other before their relationship began to fall apart, the film is at its peak a story of coming through terror, mistrust, and manipulation to find survival and (re)birth on the other side. I can recommend it in good confidence.