The calls are coming from inside the house. Like, literally, inside the house. This episode of Cape Fear ends with Tom crawling through a hole in the wall, falling through the floor, and landing in a hidden room where Max Cady’s sinister daughter Neveah has been not just hiding but actually living all this time. 

After she attacks him off-camera, Tom comes bursting through the wall. Anna, seemingly in denial of the plain truth, laughs that he was just spooked by a possum. Then Neveah’s arm reaches out and grabs her, and they literally yank the home invader through the wall, splattering blood-red paint everywhere when Anna smacks her in the head with a can to get her to stop choking Tom. 

In the commotion, the increasingly disturbed Zack — who it seems safe to say has been tripping balls ever since getting ahold of his dad’s LSD tincture — leaves a nine-toed trail of blood-paint right over to Max Cady’s house across the street.

We live in a time of unsubtle metaphors. The White House lies in ruins so the billionaire president can build a combination ballroom and bunker for himself and his rich pedophile pals, the Reflecting Pool is full of pond scum and guarded by soldiers and cops who arrest people for touching a monument that belongs to them. So by all means, stick psychotic omnisexuals in the walls, have a misogynistic freak buy the house across the street, leave literal trails of blood everywhere you go. You could not possibly be less subtle with the subtext than reality itself.

The point being made by Neveah’s existence within the very walls of the Bowdens’ happy home is that nothing is sacred, nothing is safe, home and family provide neither security nor succor. This is borne out by the plot time and again. Not a single member of the Bowden family trusts any of the others.

Anna correctly believes Tom was, at the very least, having an emotional affair with Lexi, and that this left the family vulnerable to Max’s AI sexual-harassment scheme. When Zack spikes the family’s iced tea with Tom’s acid on a hot day with no AC (most likely sabotaged by Neveah), she must additionally come to terms with the fact that he’s been hiding a drug habit. And by the way, his guns are as easily accessible to his kids as his drugs are: Natalie busts out the shotgun and blasts the camera drone that infiltrates the house during their acid trip, in some of the best black comedy of the year.

After a disastrous attempt to talk to Max directly to find out what he wants (more on that in a bit), Tom now suspects Anna of having some kind of sexual relationship with Cady in the past. Anna rejects the idea that she was fucking him during the trial out of hand, noting that she was already pregnant and that the only illicit relationship she conducted then was with her opposing counsel, Tom himself. She does not, however, deny ever having sex with him…and meanwhile, Zack sure does seem convinced that he doesn’t belong to this family. To whose family does he belong, I wonder?

Natalie, as always, feels totally alone. Her parents monitor her like prison wardens. Her brother Zack was tough enough to like when he was just a creep who shared his girlfriend’s nudes; now he’s a grinning weirdo who forcibly sticks his thumb in her mouth in her dreams. Neveah also shows up mid-nightmare; now that we know she’s actually been in the house all along, it’s entirely possible these intrusions by Zack and Neveah actually happened.

Meanwhile, Natalie’s developing a heck of a drinking problem, as her genetics might have predisposed her to. Ordered to stay at home and keep her phone on her at all times, she sneaks out to the convenience store to get hammered by herself in broad daylight. Max intercepts her on the way home, heroically (well, “heroically”) scaring off a parasitical true-crime podcaster and buying her a coffee to sober her up before dropping her home. Of course, this is before she learns that his weird daughter has been living in her home, so whatever brownie points he earned her may have already been used up.

And Zack… Well, he apparently doses the family’s iced tea with Tom’s LSD, as mentioned earlier. He’s got a dozen burner cellphones, and a direct line of communication with the girl living in their walls via a hole in his closet. He grins and leers and stares wild-eyed…much like Max, whose religion he’s apparently adopted.

Ah, about that religion. We’ve already heard that despite its roots in Santería, Max’s religion is of his own creation. What we learn in the flashbacks that bookend the episode is that Max’s padrino (the great character actor Paul Calderón) is the same old man who sat motionless while his attackers nearly killed him. Worse, he was the guy who pointed the Aryan Brotherhood in Max’s direction, as someone they could kill without worrying about protection. So after converting to the faith, Max kills his padrino, promising that he’ll offer their gods an entire family. 

Granted, Max has family of his own to worry about. He gets a letter from “C,” Juliette Lewis’s character, now pretty firmly established to be his half-sister, threatening to expose him for what he did to her. In a nauseatingly dizzy scene, Max paces around and around in circles, calling a man (Ron Perlman!!!) who has to be their father, threatening him unless he calls C off.

He’s much more firmly in control of himself when the Bowdens pay him that surprise visit after coming down from their acid trip. After ostentatiously making out with his new girlfriend Honey (KateLynn E. Newberry), he serves them a dinner they refuse to eat after they discover that he has somehow stolen the affections of their cat, as well as the cat himself. For his part, Max is disgusted that they named such a magnificent animal “Peanut Butter.”

But then they get down to brass tacks. What does Max want? He wants the Bowdens’ full, sincere public apology, with a full accounting of everything they did, and a loss of their law licenses in the process. Failing that? Max tells the story of a boy bullied by a girl who eventually falls in love with him, giving him the opportunity to torment her in turn. (Is this the story of Max and the Juliette Lewis character?) “The boy wanted to be paid in pain,” he says.

Leisurely cutting and lighting a cigar all the while, he explains that it’s worth taking your time to make someone who wronged you feel what you felt: “total loss of control.” That’s what he’s going for. He wants the Bowdens to feel the way he felt in that prison, skull cracked open, plate in his head, utterly alone and powerless. Neveah’s presence inside their house is merely an outgrowth of that desire. When they yank Max’s daughter out of the walls like a rotten tooth, when they see that their own son has vanished in his direction, they’re starting to get a taste of a meal he feasted on for year after year.

It occurs to me now that Cape Fear itself is designed to engender a similar sense of loss of control in the audience. Jeff Russo’s pounding score, derived from the work of Bernard Herrmann and Elmer Bernstein; the bizarre closeups on Max, framed and lit like Satan himself; the disarming effect of the aspect ratio slowly shifting until the image fills up the screen during the family’s acid trip; wildly unexpected developments like Neveah’s presence in the house, or even Max’s adoption of the cat, which I was fully convinced he’d cooked and prepared for dinner — If you give yourself to this show, if you put yourself in that house with these people, this show is like getting hit in the head with a can full of blood-red paint. I mean that in the most complimentary way.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.