Pliers

Pliers enter the attic confrontation as an ordinary tool from Andrew Winchester’s own kit, but Millie Calloway makes them the price of a possible exit. Passed through the gap beneath a locked door, they give Andrew a choice that exposes the bodily logic of his punishments: he must suffer pain himself to escape the confinement he has imposed on others. Later, Detective Connors’s incredulity at the report that Andrew pulled four teeth makes the pliers part of the story’s evidence as well as its violence.

From Tool Kit to Attic Threshold

Millie retrieves the pliers from the garage, where they are part of Andrew’s tool kit, and carries them to the door of the Attic Room. Their origin matters: this is not an unfamiliar implement introduced from elsewhere, but an object already associated with Andrew’s household and possessions. In Millie’s hand, however, they acquire a new use. Rather than attempting to break the door, she slides the pliers through the narrow gap beneath it, placing them within Andrew’s reach while keeping herself outside.

The transfer makes the threshold central to the object’s function. Andrew has rammed himself against the door, but it only shakes; the house is well-made, and the hinges are on the room’s interior side. He is breathing hard and struggling to catch his breath. Against that failed attempt at physical escape, the small tool can pass where Andrew cannot. The pliers do not open the door, but their movement across its lower edge creates a different route to freedom—one that depends on Andrew inflicting an injury on himself.

A Bargain Measured in Teeth

On the other side of the door, Andrew picks up the pliers and turns them back and forth, frowning as he tries to understand why Millie has sent them. She explains that the implement will make the duration of a punishment easier to measure: if Andrew wants to leave the room, he must pull out one of his teeth. She presents it as a one-time deal, but the offer is inseparable from the confinement and deprivation surrounding it. When Andrew refuses and throws the pliers onto the floor, Millie warns that further hours without water may change his decision.

The object thus becomes more than a tool: it is the material focus of an ultimatum. Andrew’s access to it does not give him control over the situation. Millie controls the door, watches him on Andrew’s phone, and makes release conditional on an act of self-injury. The ordinary shape of the pliers sharpens the reversal. Their purpose in this scene is not repair or construction, but the painful removal of a tooth as the proposed cost of leaving a locked room.

When Andrew cries out to be let out, Millie repeats that he knows what he has to do. He cradles his right hand with his left, falls to his knees, and picks up the pliers with his left hand before bringing them to his mouth. Millie closes her eyes rather than watch. His howl makes the violence audible before she looks back at the screen and sees him still kneeling, bowing his head and crying. The progression—from turning the tool over, to throwing it down, to taking it up again—records his resistance giving way under the pressure of confinement.

Reversal and Repeated Violence

The sound of Andrew’s agony recalls the howl Duncan made when Millie struck him with a paperweight. That comparison links two distinct episodes of violence through Millie’s memory: the pliers are present in the attic, while the earlier blow with the paperweight provides the remembered point of reference. The association does not make the objects interchangeable. Instead, the contrast places a tool used to compel self-injury beside an object used in a fatal assault, connecting the present scene to Millie’s history without suggesting that the pliers themselves caused Duncan’s death.

The pliers also reverse the arrangement of punishment. Andrew has confined Millie in the attic and tormented her there; now he is trapped behind a door while she watches and determines the terms of possible release. The tool cannot undo that history or free him on its own. Its force comes from the locked room, Andrew’s weakened condition, the threat of continued thirst, and Millie’s decision to make bodily pain the price of escape. In this scene, its plain material usefulness is turned into an instrument of coercion.

The Teeth as Evidence

The significance of the pliers persists after the attic confrontation. When Detective Connors questions Nina Winchester, he tests her account against the physical and practical circumstances: a grown man was supposedly locked in a room that locks only from the outside, without his phone, and then decided to pull out four of his teeth. Connors’s formulation makes the reported injuries difficult to reconcile with an innocent accident. The tool has helped turn a private struggle into an explanation that must withstand scrutiny.

The discrepancy also gives the pliers a double narrative function. During the confrontation, they make Andrew’s suffering visible to Millie through the phone screen and embody the cruel bargain she offers. Later, the teeth associated with their use become part of the story Detective Connors examines. What began as a garage tool passed beneath a door therefore carries the consequences of Millie’s reversal beyond the locked room: it marks the point at which Andrew’s method of punishment is turned back on his own body, and the resulting injuries complicate the account given after his death.