Heather Graham brings grit and vulnerability to a supernatural thriller that too often loses sight of the woman at the center of its story.
Nick Simon’s What Happened to Doris takes the real-life account of Doris Bither—the woman whose terrifying experiences inspired the book and eventual film adaptation The Entity—and gives the story a modern genre makeover. The problem is that in sanding down some of the uglier, more complicated edges of Bither’s story, the film also sands away some of what made it so fascinating in the first place.
Boogie Nights icon Heather Graham shoulders the film as Doris, a single mother of three who, in 1974, approached parapsychologist Barry Taff in a Los Angeles bookstore, desperate to make sense of a series of increasingly alarming phenomena inside her Culver City home. Taff soon began investigating the case, which forms the bulk of Simon’s film. At the time, he was working at the now-defunct parapsychology laboratory run by Thelma Moss at UCLA, where Doris’s claims would become one of the lab’s and the world’s most notorious—and controversial—cases.
The biggest change here is the decision to dial back the ghost sexual assault element that became so central to The Entity and instead reshape the material into something more PG-13 and closer to The Conjuring. After Doris is attacked, the film settles into a procedural investigation, with the parapsychology students attempting to determine what exactly is happening inside her home. There are strange noises, unexplained injuries, objects moving on their own and increasingly bizarre phenomena piling up around this woman.
But this is also where What Happened to Doris starts struggling to figure out what story it actually wants to tell.
The film initially puts us in the perspective of Doris’s children, who are trying to make sense of their mother—a woman who drinks, sleeps around and suddenly begins showing up with unexplained bruises. It’s an intriguing way into the material because it reframes Doris’s experiences through the eyes of children who don’t necessarily know whether to believe her. There’s a genuine story of lost innocence lurking there, as the kids are forced to confront the possibility that something is happening to their mother that they cannot understand or protect her from.
Then the movie shifts gears and spends more time with Doris herself, desperately trying to convince these men that what is happening to her is real. And honestly, that might have been the movie I wanted to see. There’s a fascinating psychological drama buried in that setup: Is Doris telling the truth? Is she being dismissed because of her history? What happens when everyone around you starts treating you like you’re either crazy or lying? And what does it do to a person to repeatedly insist that something terrifying is happening while the people investigating it are looking for evidence rather than believing the person experiencing it?
Instead, What Happened to Doris eventually settles into a mashup of The Conjuring and Poltergeist, complete with increasingly conventional supernatural scares and a narrative that wants to put a neat horror-movie bow on a story that, in reality, remained unresolved and plagued Doris until her death.
That’s where the film ultimately feels like it loses its way. The ambiguity of Doris’s story is arguably the most compelling thing about it, yet the movie seems almost allergic to sitting in that uncertainty. It keeps reaching for familiar genre beats when the real psychological horror is sitting right there in the question of whether anyone will ever believe this woman.
That said, What Happened to Doris is perfectly serviceable as a supernatural thriller, and there are enough moments that hint at a much better movie lurking underneath. Heather Graham does everything she can to bridge the film’s competing tones, bringing a real grit and vulnerability to Doris that gives the character considerably more weight than the screenplay sometimes allows. Watching Graham work is equal parts engrossing and frustrating—not because she isn’t good, but because the movie seems unsure what to do with what she’s giving it.
By the final act, much of that rawness has been swallowed up by conventional horror mechanics cribbed from a dozen other movies. The psychological toll of what Doris is experiencing becomes secondary to the next scare, the next supernatural escalation, the next attempt to turn an unresolved real-life nightmare into a satisfying genre narrative.
And that’s ultimately what feels like the biggest missed opportunity. What Happened to Doris had two genuinely compelling stories sitting right in front of it: the children trying to understand what is happening to their mother, and Doris fighting to convince a room full of skeptical men that she isn’t imagining it. Either could have made for a fascinating film. Instead, the movie keeps bouncing between them before eventually choosing the safer, more familiar path.
I wanted to like What Happened to Doris more than I did. There are flashes of something genuinely unsettling here, and Graham gives the film a bruised, human center. But for a movie supposedly concerned with what happened to Doris, it too often forgets to ask the more interesting question: what did it feel like to be Doris? How did she endure this? That’s the movie I wish we’d gotten.
