Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Locks Girl in a Cage
Every once in a while, a movie comes along that reminds you how deeply unsettling—and weirdly entertaining—human obsession can be. Pet (2016), directed by Carles Torrens and written by Jeremy Slater, is that movie. It’s a psychological thriller with teeth—sharp, bloody, and smiling politely.
It’s also the kind of film you put on expecting a basic stalker story and end up watching slack-jawed, muttering, “Oh… oh no, she’s worse.” What starts as The 40-Year-Old Virgin meets Silence of the Lambs quickly spirals into Fifty Shades of Stockholm Syndrome, only smarter and with better lighting.
Meet Seth: The Man, the Myth, the Walking Red Flag
Dominic Monaghan, best known as Merry the Hobbit or “that guy from Lost,” plays Seth, an introverted animal shelter worker who’s clearly one unreturned text away from a nervous breakdown. He’s awkward, lonely, and has the emotional intelligence of a wet sponge. When he spots Holly (Ksenia Solo), a waitress he vaguely remembers from high school, he decides she’s The One—mainly because she exists and talks to him once.
Seth’s brand of courtship involves researching Holly’s online profiles, buying her flowers, and eventually building a human-sized cage in an abandoned section of his workplace. You know, normal dating stuff. When she rebuffs him, he reacts the way any rational adult would—by kidnapping her and delivering a heartfelt speech about how this is for her own good.
It’s like Beauty and the Beast, if the Beast worked in pest control and didn’t believe in personal boundaries.
Holly: The Real Monster Next Door
But here’s where Pet earns its horror stripes. Just when you think Seth is the creepiest creature in the room, the movie flips the table—literally and figuratively. Because Holly? Sweet, sad, poetic Holly? She’s not the victim you think she is.
Through her journal (which Seth creepily steals and reads like it’s the Dead Sea Scrolls of dating), we learn she’s a genuine psychopath. As in: she kills people for fun. Not metaphorically, not “she’s mean on social media”—we’re talking full-blown knife-hobbyist territory.
Ksenia Solo is mesmerizing in the role. Her big eyes and delicate frame sell innocence, but her performance carries an undercurrent of chaos. Once she reveals her true nature, she becomes the kind of villain who smiles while dismantling your sanity. Watching her reverse-psychology Seth into committing murder is both horrifying and hilarious. It’s like watching a hamster outwit a lab technician—if the hamster also had a body count.
A Love Story Written in Blood and Bad Decisions
The twisted chemistry between Seth and Holly drives the film. Their relationship is less “boy meets girl” and more “boy kidnaps girl, girl gaslights boy until he thanks her for it.”
In one unforgettable sequence, Holly manipulates Seth into killing his friend Nate (Da’Vone McDonald), the security guard who suspects something’s up. She doesn’t just survive captivity—she thrives in it, like Hannibal Lecter if he were trapped in IKEA and decided to redecorate.
Seth, meanwhile, devolves beautifully. Dominic Monaghan plays him with a mix of wounded puppy and aspiring cult leader, a man who genuinely believes he’s doing the right thing while the audience screams, “Please stop doing literally anything.”
The Script: Twisted Logic, Perfectly Executed
Jeremy Slater’s script is a delicious inversion of genre expectations. What begins as a grim little stalker story transforms into a duel of sociopaths. You think you’re watching a movie about a man trying to control a woman, but by the midpoint, it’s clear she’s the one running the experiment—and he’s the lab rat.
It’s rare to see a horror-thriller that truly weaponizes empathy like this. You don’t like anyone in Pet, but you can’t look away. The dialogue drips with dark irony, the pacing is tight, and the moral ambiguity is thicker than the glass walls of Holly’s cage.
The Cinematography: Industrial Romance
Visually, Pet makes excellent use of its claustrophobic setting. Most of the film takes place in an abandoned animal shelter—a perfect metaphor for both characters. Seth is the lonely zookeeper; Holly, the apex predator behind bars.
The lighting is all shadows and muted greens, giving everything the look of a love story filmed in a sewer. It’s grimy, damp, and oddly intimate. When the camera lingers on the cage, it feels less like a prison and more like a confessional.
Cinematographer Josep M. Civit deserves credit for finding beauty in the bleak. Even the blood looks classy—like something out of a macabre perfume commercial.
The Supporting Cast: Victims of Love (and Plot)
Jennette McCurdy, best known for iCarly, pops up as Holly’s unlucky friend Claire—the first domino in her string of murders. It’s a brief role, but she sells it. Claire’s ghost even shows up as a hallucination, offering Holly advice like a morally bankrupt Jiminy Cricket.
Nate, the well-meaning coworker who gives Seth terrible dating advice, serves as the film’s comic relief—until his skull meets a cinder block. It’s the kind of death that makes you wince and laugh nervously because, honestly, you saw it coming the moment he said, “Be confident, bro.”
The Twist Ending: Revenge Served Cold (and Still Breathing)
Just when you think Pet can’t get any darker, it pulls one last rabbit—sorry, body part—out of its hat. After Holly fakes remorse, manipulates Seth into mutilating himself, and slits his throat, she walks free. We cut to months later: she’s back with her ex, Eric, pretending to live a normal life and writing her “fictional” stories about the ordeal.
But surprise—Seth’s still alive. And in a final, twisted inversion, Holly now keeps him locked in a cage, battered and broken, as her personal emotional support captive. She thanks him for “saving” her—by becoming the outlet for her murderous impulses.
It’s horrifying. It’s poetic. It’s the world’s most toxic relationship finally achieving symmetry.
Themes: Love, Control, and Emotional Taxidermy
At its core, Pet isn’t about romance or revenge—it’s about the illusion of control. Seth believes he’s saving Holly. Holly believes she’s enlightening Seth. In reality, they’re both dissecting the same concept: what does it mean to truly “own” another person?
The film’s dark humor comes from how earnestly these two psychopaths treat their dysfunction as destiny. It’s a love story where both partners belong in therapy, jail, or a biology exhibit.
Final Thoughts: A Sick, Smart, Seductively Twisted Treat
Pet is a small film with big psychological teeth. It’s weird, wickedly funny, and unsettling in all the right ways. Dominic Monaghan’s tragic delusion paired with Ksenia Solo’s ice-cold charm creates a dynamic that’s equal parts romance and vivisection.
Carles Torrens directs with restraint, letting the tension simmer until it boils over in violence and irony. It’s a film that sneaks up on you, makes you laugh at its absurdity, and then slaps you with the realization that you’ve just rooted for two people who really should be on separate continents.
Verdict:
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ out of 5.
A darkly romantic psychological thriller that proves sometimes true love means never letting go—literally.
