Kendrie
Role: Emotional protagonist
Function: Primary point of identification; the character through whom the house speaks
Character Sketch
Kendrie feels things before she understands them. This is her defining quality — an emotional absorption that makes her attuned, present, and tender in close relationships, and vulnerable in environments that carry weight she can’t process. She is not fragile in the dramatic sense. She is porous.
She moves into the Bronx house with Charlize seeking something real: independence from family systems, a life that is hers, closeness with the woman she loves. What she doesn’t account for is that closeness has costs — that being fully open means there’s no filter between her and whatever a space carries.
Wants vs. Needs
Want: Safety, reassurance, and closeness — to feel held, to feel that the life she is building with Charlize is real and permanent.
Need: To develop a self that can hold its own weight without requiring the external world to be quiet. The house teaches her that the world is not quiet, and that she will have to learn to be present inside that.
Emotional Profile
- Sensitivity: Absorbs mood and affect from environments and people around her, often before consciously registering it
- Attachment style: Anxious-leaning; seeks confirmation and proximity; experiences Charlize’s emotional distance as a threat even when it isn’t
- Response to the house: Feels something immediately — an atmospheric unease she can’t name. Tries to name it to Charlize and is met with rationalism. This gap becomes the engine of the film’s central tension.
- Physical expressiveness: Communicates emotionally through the body — stillness when frightened, restlessness when anxious, a specific quality of listening
Relationship to the House
Kendrie responds to the house the way a tuning fork responds to a tone: not because she’s imagining it, but because she is constitutionally unable to not respond. The history of the basement — the deaths, the grief, the unresolved weight — registers in her before she knows it’s there. This is not supernatural in a way the film confirms. It is Kendrie. It may also be the house.
She begins to seek out information she should not seek, to spend time in spaces she should probably leave. Not because she is drawn to darkness, but because she is trying to understand what she’s feeling, and the house is where the feeling lives.
Relationship to Charlize
The relationship is real and warm and strained. Kendrie needs Charlize to feel it too — not because she wants Charlize to suffer, but because the loneliness of being the only one who feels something is, for Kendrie, one of the worst things there is. When Charlize’s rationalism shuts down her experience, Kendrie doesn’t fight. She withdraws. She goes to the basement.
Relationship to Other Characters
Alexis: Instinctive, almost immediate recognition. Kendrie feels Alexis carries something before she knows what it is. Once the history of the house is shared, Kendrie holds it with a reverence that Alexis didn’t expect.
Melissa: Comfort. Melissa’s warmth is something Kendrie leans into. Melissa also serves, without intending to, as a model of what it might look like to have held loss and remained intact.
Uncle: Reads him clearly before anyone explains. His refusal to sleep in the house says everything she needs to know.
Arc
Beginning: Moves into the house with hope, excitement, and a baseline of low-level anxiety she’s learned to live with.
Middle: The house’s weight finds her. She tries to reach Charlize. The gap between what she experiences and what Charlize can receive becomes a fracture. She goes deeper into the house’s history, possibly deeper into herself.
End: Does not resolve cleanly. The house does not leave her. She is changed. Whether this is damage or knowledge is the film’s final question.
Visual Notes
- Often shot in medium and close: the camera stays near her face
- Silence is her emotional register — she is often most present when she is saying nothing
- The contrast between her stillness and the house’s subtle restlessness is the film’s central visual tension
Sound Design Notes
- Her scenes are sonically quieter than average — her sensitivity is communicated partly through reduced ambient noise, as though she is listening harder than everyone else
- When the house is “speaking” to her, it is not through overt sound design but through absence: the stopping of ambient sound before the resumption
Performance Notes
- Avoid over-emoting: Kendrie’s sensitivity reads in restraint, not expression
- The feeling should be legible before she articulates it
- Physical stillness is power, not passivity
- Chemistry with Charlize should feel lived-in — small moments of touch, of domestic rhythm, of instinctive physical proximity