Meet Oliver, an autistic young boy who is obsessed with his phone, and spends all day
watching his cartoon shows.
But unbeknownst to him, something is watching him from inside the screen.
Later that night, he wakes to find an e-book recommended to him titled Misunderstood Monsters.
For some reason, he couldn’t close the tab, so he decides to open the book.
While looking at the e-book, he finds his lamp turning on and off without any reason.
The book tells a story about a monster named Larry, who just wants a friend.
But as he keeps scrolling, all the lights in the house suddenly goes out.
Scared, he shuts his bedroom door, but it swings open again, so he closes it one more
time and blocks the door with several toys, before hiding under his blanket.
However, despite his efforts, the door swings open again.
Thank god it is just his mom, Sarah.
Seeing him freak out, she patiently opens the app on his phone that helps him communicate.
Since the child can't talk, he tries letting her know something is in the house using an
application on his cellphone, but she assures him there isn’t.
At school, he gets preoccupied by thoughts of Larry the monster, and here we see his
classmates make fun of him for needing a phone app to communicate.
After class, one of his classmates, Mateo, asks him to hangout, and points him to a direction
that only leads to an empty field.
Not long after, Mateo, Zach, and their leader, Byron, gang up against him and start making
fun of him right to his face.
As Oliver struggles to use the app to communicate, the thing in his phone becomes agitated.
After retaliating the taunts by calling Byron ugly using the app, Byron throws Oliver’s
phone in a ditch, prompting him to frantically search for it, but he couldn’t retrieve it.
A few hours later, Oliver attends his regular speech therapy appointment with his mother,
who has now learned that he lost his phone.
This worries her, but the therapist points out that Oliver shouldn’t depend on a phone
forever to communicate, and should instead try to find a friend.
Oliver’s father, Marty, works as a parking lot booth attendant.
That evening, he digs out an iPad in the Lost & Found box, and thinks about giving it to
his son.
As he holds the tablet,
the lights start flickering, and the door suddenly swings open, scaring him.
He immediately goes and fixes the lights while harsh winds keep blowing outside, but unbeknownst
to him, an invisible figure takes form in the background before disappearing.
Later that evening after Marty gets home and presents Oliver with the one night, his wife
Sarah vents to him about how their son Oliver seems to like him over her.
This is because he always comes home bearing nice gifts, while she sticks with Oliver through
uncomfortable parts of his day, such as his speech therapy.
As the parents argue, Oliver is toying with the face recognition feature on his new iPad,
until the camera registers another face behind him.
This prompts him to look inside his closet, but as there is nothing there, he returns
to his iPad and spins around the room, while using a photo filter.
Scared, he continues to use his camera to look for the invisible being again, but it
seems to be gone for now.
He shuts the closet door before he goes to bed that night.
Interestingly, his father can be seen driving away from the house late at night, while his
mother solemnly tucks Oliver in.
In the morning, Oliver randomly taps in the words ‘is dad gone’ on his tablet, and
to his surprise, the app responses with a voiceover saying ‘yes,’ continued by a
‘hello.’
Oliver then asks the person who replies to introduce themself, and after a short while…
The tablet spouts out words about how his name is Larry, and all he wants is to be Oliver’s friend.
While Oliver sits there in shock, his mother comes in, announcing that she’s scheduling
a playdate for Oliver tonight, followed by telling him that she and the father are getting
a divorce.
But of course, the boy is too shooketh to even register what his mom is saying, so he
storms off to pick up his tablet, and tuck it away in the spandrel before retreating
to his room.
That night, Sarah organizes a sleepover so Oliver can become more social.
She welcomes her friend, Jennifer, along with her son, Byron, as well as Mateo and Zach.
Although it is obvious three boys aren’t fond of Oliver, they agree to have a sleepover
at the house tonight as per their mothers’ orders.
They set up roll-up beds in the living room, but none of them could sleep, because Oliver
keeps fussing about while staring at the spandrel.
Vexed, the boys dig inside the spandrel and take out the tablet, where they immediately
see the e-book displayed on the iPad.
Byron begins reading it out loud, while the house lights start flickering around them
as they go on.
According to the story, Larry the monster watches through the phone screen, and he needs
someone to finish reading this e-book so that he could fully step out into our world.
All of the sudden, all the lights around them go out, scaring the boys.
They try switching them back on to no avail.
It is now that Oliver decides to use his iPad camera to look for Larry, and sees a strange
figure curled up in the corner.
When the figure moves, the boys freak out, but convince themselves it’s nothing but
an app feature.
Byron snatches the iPad again, and continues reading the story out loud like a dummy to
prove his point.
He then walks to the edge of the room to show his friends there is no such thing as Larry.
But then he gets slammed into the world by the table.
This is the time that Larry decides to make his presence known.
The boys start screaming, waking up Sarah.
Afterwards, the boys’ parents are summoned in the dead of night, because the three are
traumatized and are begging to come home.
When Sarah questions them what happened, the terrified boys are quick to blame it on Oliver
for being a freak.
On the next day, it seems that Byron is absent from school, leaving us to wonder if something
happened to him.
Meanwhile, Sarah returns home with a set of new lightbulbs, because all the lightbulbs
around the house died after what happened last night.
Despite her confusion, she begins replacing the bulbs, until she comes across the e-book
about Larry on Oliver’s iPad and starts reading it.
As she does, she notices the lights in the dining room starts flickering, so she goes
to take a look at it, only to find that all the lightbulbs around the house have been
replaced when she returns to the living room.
This of course scares her, and she starts calling for her husband to check if he is
home.
After hearing the sound of furniture being moved, she takes a knife from the kitchen,
and this is when a voiceover suddenly says hello through the iPad.
Larry the iPad monster goes on to say that he’s going to kill Oliver through the voiceover
feature in the device.
Thinking it’s a hacker trying to mess with her son, the concerned Sarah rushes to pick
Oliver up from school.
As they’re about to head out, her friend Jennifer calls, so they pay her a visit.
Here Sarah discovers that Byron hasn’t been sleeping or talking since last weekend.
After Oliver tries to cheer him up by putting on SpongeBob to watch together, Byron finally
comes clean to the adults by saying that Oliver didn’t do anything wrong during the sleepover;
Larry did.
He claims that an unseen entity named Larry messed with the lights and furniture, as well
tried to choke him that night.
Because Sarah has read the story on the iPad too and experienced the lights flickering,
she doesn’t question Byron.
The mother and son go home and start packing immediately, ready to vacate the house.
However, right as they’re about to leave, Oliver picks up his iPad,
and then he hears someone's footsteps.
When he looks through the camera, he sees Larry walking in into his room.
When Oliver enters his room, he sees Larry putting a sponge on his bed, while asking
him to step closer.
Oliver tries to look under the bed, but finds no one there.
He picks up the sponge Larry put on his bed, and pack them inside his bag before they go.
They seek refuge at the father’s place, who has a hard time believing Sarah’s explanation
about Larry.
Oliver also tells him that Larry wants him as a friend.
But instead, the father thinks she needs some sleep and offers to bring Oliver to work while
Sarah rests for once.
With Sarah’s consent, Marty the father brings his son to work.
After they arrive, he opens the iPad and begins scrolling through the e-Book, while convincing
Oliver that scary stories aren’t real.
But as he flips through the pages, the lights start blinking, until it finally goes out
altogether.
Despite this, he still assures Oliver everything’s fine, and takes out his tool bag from his
truck to fix the lights.
Inside the bag, Oliver finds a laser distance meter, which he takes out to the parking lot
with him, because at this point he seems to have a death wish.
He points the device at thin air, and watches as the number on the meter keeps decreasing,
meaning that someone is coming towards him.
The reading on the meter then shows someone is in front of him, so Oliver tries throwing
his slime toy at him, and it sticks to thin air.
But before they interact further, the father scoops Oliver up and takes him back inside
the booth.
Seeing how spooked Oliver is, he turns on the iPad camera, and once again tries convincing
his son that there is no monster around, while ironically, Oliver is slowly being lifted
up in the air behind him.
When the father turns around, he sees a glimpse of Larry on the screen and freaks out.
He quickly snatches Oliver and takes him back home,
where he finally admits to Sarah that he believes her now.
Oliver then draws to communicate with his parents; through these drawings, the parents
conclude that Larry is invisible because he lives in a different world from theirs, and
he has not fully made the transition to their world yet, that is why he hasn’t been successful
in snatching Oliver.
In order to keep Larry from travelling into their world, the parents destroy Oliver’s iPad.
On the next day, they try informing Oliver’s speech therapist about Larry the monster,
but she doesn’t believe them.
She thinks it’s debilitating to keep Oliver away from gadgets because he still isn’t
able to communicate verbally.
At school, we see that Oliver’s been given a new phone,
and he informs Byron about how Larry won’t bother anyone again because the iPad has been destroyed.
Byron then says they used to be friends, but stopped ever since an incident
wherein Oliver punched Byron.
After the incident, Oliver's mom Sarah called to tell Byron that Oliver didn't want to be friends again.
This shocks Oliver, because that isn’t true, and he’s surprised his mother would come
up with such lies.
On the evening, the father is at work, when he discovers that Larry’s e-Book is now
on his phone.
Instead of closing it, he dramatically gasps and starts scrolling through the pages instead.
The book warns that whoever stops Larry from getting a new friend will die.
And with that, all the lights go out, while the parked cars start beeping one by one.
The father begins hearing heavy footsteps around him, so he hides under his desk, and
uses his phone camera to see where Larry’s at.
When Larry finally ambushes him, he makes a break for his car and drives away.
But then, he sees street lights are going off, which means Larry is following him.
The creature jumps onto his car, and when Marty looks through his phone camera, he sees
him behind his car.
He gets terrified and his phone falls from his hand.
But when he picks up his phone, he sees Larry sitting next to him.
Back home, Sarah receives a phone call from the police informing her her husband was found
by the side of the road, and is now hospitalized.
When she frantically heads out, she begins hearing Larry breathing on the phone, and
discovers the e-Book now displayed on her phone screen, so she tosses her phone away.
Right after, she dumps every single phone in the house down the dumpster.
When she enters the living room, she finds the TV on.
Larry communicates through the TV by saying that he is made of loneliness, and simply
will not stop until he finds a friend, followed by showing his e-Book on the TV screen, and
starts scrolling right to the very last page, which depicts Larry dragging a kid to enter
his world.
Finally infuriated, Sarah rips the TV off the wall and throws it away, and does the
same with all electrical devices in the house.
The lights around the house start blinking rapidly, until they finally die altogether.
At some point, Oliver decides to step out of the house, where he and Sarah get to watch
how all the lights all over the neighborhood suddenly go out, while car headlights take
turn blinking as Larry approaches them.
At last, because they have scrolled to the very last page of the e-book, Larry is finally
able to step out from the Upside Down world.
This of course scare the mother and son, so they retreat inside the house and hide behind
a pillar, while Larry enters the house to look for them.
Not long after, they slip past him, and make their way upstairs to hide under Oliver’s bed.
Through writing, Oliver decides to confront his mom for ending his friendship with Byron
by telling lies.
Because he’s hurt by this, he proclaims that he’s going to let Larry come get him,
but his mother apologizes and convinces him to stay.
After some time, Larry enters the room and walks around to look for them.
While the two wait in fear, Oliver for some reason decides to utter his first word: “field.”
This draws Larry’s attention and forces them to come out of hiding.
But just before stepping out of the bedroom, Oliver picks up a baseball bat and smashes
all the remaining lights in the room — interestingly, this seems to have an effect on Larry, as
he begins to disappear again.
Afterwards, Oliver guides his mother downstairs while shouting ‘field’ over and over.
They run through the neighborhood down to the field where Oliver lost his phone and
watch how the lights outside the field flicker, but Larry doesn’t seem able to step closer
to them, because Larry needs to be around a source of electricity to travel.
However, they’re forgetting one thing; Oliver’s missing phone.
Larry uses the screen to step out and chase after them, forcing them to run deep into
the swamp, until they are separated.
At last, Larry snatches Oliver and drags him away from his mother, before letting him go
and beckoning him to take his hand.
But before he reaches Oliver, Sarah takes his hand, sacrificing herself to protect Oliver.
The child looks his mother in the eye for the first time in their final moments, something
Sarah has battled with since Oliver's diagnosis.
Her face begins to contort in an odd way, and all of the sudden she disappears, marking
that Larry has taken her to his world.
The next scene shows Oliver attending speech therapy with his father who now uses a crutch
to walk.
With Sarah gone, he vows to be a better father for Oliver.
At school, Oliver’s social life seems to have improved as well; he is now friends again
with Byron and Mateo.
On the last scene, Marty the father wakes up at night to find Oliver dancing in the
living room with thin air; as he opens his phone camera, he sees his wife Sarah there,
happily embracing her son.
Marty smiles as Sarah tells the son that she'll protect Oliver.