Rose takes a break from work after the death of her patient and attends her nephew Jackson’s birthday party. Her relationship with her sister Holly is far from perfect as they both took completely different paths after the death of their mother. Rose and the audience beg for a break from this unrelenting tension, but when it comes time to open Aunt Rose’s present, Jackson reaches into the box and pulls out Rose’s dead cat Mustache. Rose tries to explain that it wasn’t her and ends up falling through a table, getting broken glass in her arms and screaming bloody murder to the shocked partygoers.
We’ve all seen a child pretend to like a gift from an out-of-contact relative, but this one takes the proverbial cake. The mustache disappears earlier in the film, and the script allows for enough time that a dead cat is the last thing we expect in this box. To see Rose plead before a room full of horrified families that she didn’t do it is heartbreaking. How could she get her to believe her?
As Rose crashes through the table, her arms are riddled with broken glass and blood oozes. It’s a grotesque sight. The entity slowly isolates Rose by causing others to believe she is going insane, and feeds on those moments like appetizers before the main course. After that birthday party, everyone involved needs years of therapy.