Breached (2023)

John and Meg paddle downriver in the canoe, desperate for phone signal or a boat to escape the cabin's horrors, leaving Linda, Cole, and the deformed Jacob behind.

John grips the paddle tightly, his face etched with exhaustion and fear as the river currents pull them downstream under a darkening sky. Meg sits beside him, her hand protectively on her pregnant belly, her eyes scanning the misty banks lined with dense evergreens, whispering that they need to get help before whatever's happening spreads. The water laps coldly against the canoe's sides, and distant howls echo from the woods, heightening their isolation.

Back at the cabin, Linda hunches over Cole's computer in the dimly lit room, her fingers trembling as she uncovers encrypted video files. The screen flickers to life with grainy footage: Cole, his body already twisting with unnatural deformities--extra fingers sprouting, skin bubbling--drags screaming victims one by one into the glowing keyhole-shaped machine in the attic, their bodies shredding apart as they cross the threshold into another reality. Linda's breath catches; she watches helplessly as her daughter Isabelle, wide-eyed and pleading, is force-fed into the device by her own father, her small form convulsing and vanishing in a burst of otherworldly light.

Cole enters the room silently, his calm demeanor cracking into menace, his mutated hand flexing. Linda confronts him, shotgun shaking in her grip, demanding why he sacrificed Isabelle. Cole explains flatly that the machine breaches realities, pulling in duplicates--versions of people from parallel worlds--and the canoe body was one such duplicate of himself, not the real Cole who stands before her now. He reveals Meg is the true breach, a duplicate herself, infiltrated unknowingly, carrying a tainted pregnancy that will birth something monstrous.

In the attic, Jacob stirs from his fugue, his hand grotesquely swollen with extra digits, bones shifting visibly under his skin. He stumbles toward the humming machine, drawn by an invisible pull, muttering incoherently about portals to hellish dimensions.

Linda blasts Cole with the shotgun at point-blank range, his chest exploding in a spray of black ichor and shredded flesh, but he doesn't fall--his duplicate nature lets him regenerate slowly, wounds knitting with wet, sucking sounds. She backs away, firing again, but Jacob lunges from the shadows, his deformed body slamming into her. They grapple fiercely; Linda shoves the shotgun barrel into his mouth and pulls the trigger, his head erupting in gore, brains and bone fragments splattering the walls as he collapses dead, his body twitching into stillness.

Cole advances on Linda, grabbing her throat with superhuman strength, his face a mask of serene madness. She claws at him, stabbing with a jagged piece of equipment, but he overpowers her, hurling her into the machine's glowing doorway. Linda screams as her body distends--limbs elongating, skin ripping open to reveal impossible innards--before she's pulled through, shredded and gone forever.

Meanwhile, John and Meg reach a weak signal spot on the riverbank. John dials for backup, but static crackles through the phone as Connie's earlier voicemail plays back: confirmation that the river corpse was definitively Cole Parsons. Meg's eyes widen in realization, but before they can react, John spots unnatural ripples in the water--hints of the breach spreading.

The film closes on John and Meg motoring away in a found boat, the cabin receding into the fog-shrouded wilderness, but John's face hardens with unspoken dread as he glances at Meg's belly, knowing the duplicate taint lingers within her. Cole's true form, the original physicist, survives undetected in the woods, his experiments poised to unravel more realities. Jacob lies dead in the attic, mutilated beyond recognition. Linda perishes violently in the machine, her body irretrievably lost across dimensions. Meg carries the breach forward unknowingly, her pregnancy dooming any future. John escapes physically but remains haunted, his final case binding him eternally to Lone Crow's curse.

The mangled body discovered washed up on the Porcupine River lacks bones, has too many fingers, and exhibits uncanny wounds unlike anything from bugs or animals, later tied to physicist Cole Parsons' experimental machine that shreds insides and deforms victims.

The body identified as Cole Parsons, the physicist from Oklahoma leasing a cabin, washes up shredded, yet Cole himself shows up at the cabin confused, revealed through videos and events as a duplicated or alternate version due to his portal machine breaching realities.

Coroner Jacob enters the attic machine in a fugue state during a power outage, emerging with a deformed hand that worsens as his new body erupts from his old skin, fulfilling a prophecy-like horror as Meg and Hawkins fight the monstrous transformation.

In the attic of his cabin lab filled with sketches of oddities, Cole's keyhole-shaped contraption acts as a 'portal' doorway between realities, deforming those who pass through it--like Jake and victims 'fed' into it--causing bone loss, extra fingers, and eruptions, not Cole's typical work per Linda.

Linda accesses Cole's computer to find videos of him 'feeding' multiple people into the machine, including their daughter Isabelle whom 'this machine took,' showing Cole himself deforming, confirming his experiments caused her disappearance and the horrors.