Ouija: Origin of Evil

Los Angeles, 1967. Widowed mother Alice Zander runs faked seances out of her home, with her teenage daughter Paulina ('Lina') and her nine-year-old, Doris, working the rigged tricks — knock boxes, table levitation, hidden audio cues — to give grieving clients the comfort of a goodbye from their dead. The Zanders barely make rent, and Alice's pitch lands somewhere between con and ministry; she believes she is doing a kind of mercy.

At Lina's suggestion, Alice adds a Ouija board to the act as a novelty. Alone with it after hours, Alice feels what seems like real contact and convinces herself she has reached her late husband Roger. Doris, who misses her father with a child's rawness, sits down at the board by herself and finds the planchette moves without her. She begins relaying messages that turn out to be uncannily accurate — details only the dead could know — and Alice, seizing on it as proof, builds the business around her younger daughter's apparent gift.

Doris's behavior darkens. She speaks in a layered, adult voice; she knows things she shouldn't; at school she fills page after page with cursive Polish, a language no one in the family knows. Father Tom Hogan, principal at Doris's Catholic school and a former priest who left the vocation after losing his wife, takes one look at the pages and tells Alice they describe surgical experiments in clinical detail. He explains what he is seeing: Doris is not channeling Roger and never was. Something else has been using the door she opened.

Investigating the house, Father Tom and Alice find that the basement walls hide the corpses of immigrant victims tortured to death by a Nazi-aligned doctor named Marcus, who lived there before them. Marcus sewed his victims' mouths shut and used their suffering to crack the boundary between the living and whatever waited on the other side. The Ouija board has simply finished his work, and Doris — small, willing, unguarded — has been the conduit it needed.

The possession completes. Doris kills Father Tom in the basement, sewing his mouth shut with the planchette. Alice realizes the only way to seal the door is to silence the body the entity is speaking through — she sews her own daughter's mouth shut to close the breach. The act kills Doris but halts the spread; Alice dies in the struggle as well. Lina survives, alone.

A coda jumps forward decades. Grown and institutionalized, Lina sits in a psychiatric ward, her mouth sewn shut. The damage was never contained — only delayed — and the film closes by handing the haunting directly to the events of the 2014 original Ouija.