Cabinet of Curiosities Episode 8 Ending Explained: “The Murmuring” Do Nancy and Edgar Reconcile?

The Murmuring is, in my opinion, one of the weakest episodes of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. The plot moves very slowly, telling the story of a couple of ornithologists, Edgar and Nancy, who move to an isolated house to study an interesting species of birds.

The premise sounds pretty boring and for much of the episode, the narrative is as slow as it gets. The plot conflict stems from the recent death of Nancy and Edgar‘s daughter, something that is causing their relationship to worsen and they are drifting apart. That is why, when we arrive at the house, we begin to see several moments in which the marriage suffers and they stop talking or spending time together.

Cabinet of Curiosities Episode 8 “The Murmuring”: Plot Summary

Nancy and Edgar Bradley are a very active married couple who are recognized in their profession. They are two ornithologists who have studied (and continue to do so) the flight of birds. With a lot of cutting-edge technologies (for what is the standard of the 1950s), the couple discovered how birds in flight create shapes, almost aimed at delivering a message to those who observe them. A new opportunity to study the behaviour of sandpipers will be the excuse to travel to Nova Scotia and live in an old house. But the rooms of the house, the objects and other strange presences inside will bring to light the mourning never elaborated by the couple and never even dormant.

It is a story with a linear path, but no less dense and interesting, the one embodied by del Toro himself in the subject and subsequently reworked by Jennifer Kent. The director seems to be particularly at ease with these themes (also present in her way in her debut work Babadook) and gives life to a story that is not afraid of fear and a good dose of tension, but which focuses mostly on human nature, silences and the unspoken between spouses. And it is here that the murmurs of birds (as the movements they make in flight are called) become the murmurs of the protagonists, interrupted and whispered voices, which force them not to express their inner abyss.

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• In addition to the depression, she feels over her daughter’s death, Nancy begins to see things in the lonely house.
• It seems that several spirits haunt the halls of the mansion at night.
• Little by little, the ornithologist begins to discover the history of the ancient inhabitants.
• According to some letters he finds, it seems that a mother and her son lived there who were abandoned.
• Immersed in sadness, the woman ended up drowning the child.
• The scares are quite scarce and somewhat boring.

The director intends that we sympathize with Nancy and the pain she feels for the loss of her daughter. This is something that makes her feel guilty, feeling connected to that mother who lived in the mansion before her. The parallelism is good and it works, but by not showing anything about the event that marked the marriage, we did not finish forming that crucial connection with the protagonist.

That’s why the ending is confusing. When Nancy manages to pass the spirits to the afterlife, she also lifts a great mental weight. Somehow, processing the pain of her former inhabitants helps her to understand what she feels and to deal with her sadness. It is not something super complex, but if we do not understand the parallelism between both mothers, it is an empty and absurd moment.