LILLY LIVES ALONE - Mark Reviews Movies

Lilly Lives Alone, Dark Sky Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 21, 2025

One genuinely does want to sympathize with or at least understand the eponymous character of Lilly Lives Alone. She's a woman, as the title also tells us, who has an isolated existence inside her home, apart from a job at a local grocery store that might not last much longer if she keep showing up late for work. The house, we learn, was the same one where Lilly (Shannon Beeby) grew up, and after the deaths of her parents, she stayed there and had a child of her own.

When the story of writer/director Martin Melnick's feature debut begins, Lilly's daughter has been dead for ten years. The circumstances of the child's death were and remain mysterious to those in town. Some, as Lilly makes clear from her accusations about her neighbors and her general paranoia whenever she has to deal with them, believe Lilly is to blame for the girl's death. Lilly insists she wasn't, but the famous line about a lady protesting too much comes to mind a couple of times here.

We first meet Lilly in the morning after a one-night stand with Jed (Ryan Jonze). Jed wants more and starts asking her questions. She doesn't answer any of them, except as vague riddles. She goes to work, talks with co-worker and friend Claire (Erin Way), and returns home to find Jed there again.

After making it especially clear that she isn't interested in him anymore, a microwave dinner, a bottle of booze, and falling asleep in a chair await her for the night. Soon enough, though, the reminders of her daughter's death start coming.

The setup of Melnick's movie isn't the issue when it comes to finding a way to try to find sympathy or understanding for this character. If Lilly is blameless in her child's death, this is a terrible tragedy and a kind of grief that no one should have to endure. If she is to blame for whatever reason and to whatever degree, it still remains a tragedy of obviously unbearable grief.

Melnick doesn't seem to trust the audience to perceive it that way, or perhaps, the filmmaker doesn't exactly see his protagonist in quite the same way. It's almost impossible to gauge how the movie itself feels about Lilly and her situation, because most of it plays it with the logic of a nightmare and, when it doesn't doing that, the movie keeps key details of information about Lilly, her family, and the girl's death a secret until the third act.

It's essentially playing two types of games. The first is that feeling of a nightmare, which amounts to some horror-movie clichés of strange noises coming from inside the house and assorted jump-scares. There are two possible explanations as to why these things are happening.

One is that Lilly, who realizes it's the tenth anniversary of daughter's death, has taken more prescription pills—for her depression and anxiety—than she should. The other is that there's a real source for those noises that isn't inside her grief-stricken and potentially guilt-ridden mind, and then, we have to wonder if that possible source is either really, tangibly real or yet another thing entirely.

Already, the movie has lost sight of Lilly in any meaningful way, because the narrative has become a series of questions that may or may not be answered by the movie's end. Lilly's role isn't to be a character here. It's to be both an enigma and the target of various scares in a horror show. She sits around, starts seeing or hearing strange things, and occasionally has the wits scared out of her when a figure appears in or outside the house. Meanwhile, she keeps everything of note about her and her past bottled up until, apparently, she also gets an admission of what she's really feeling to be scared out of her, too.

There's some more game-playing, as well, from neighbor Russel (Jeffrey Combs), who might be nosy or genuinely concerned about Lilly, to some shots from outside the house, recorded by someone with a digital camera. Is the explanation for the strange events inside the house as simple as someone or some people playing pranks on the woman some suspect to have killed her daughter? When we're discussing something as serious and traumatic as Lilly's situation, is playing games really the way to get any kind of truth beyond matters of the plot?

It's not here, to be sure. Lilly Lives Alone just goes in the same circles, spinning a familiar pattern and around any genuine comprehension of its main character.

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