Grief paints the Curse — Understanding What Remains of Edith Finch
What Remains of Edith Finch is a beautifully crafted game developed by Giant Sparrow that launched in April 2017. It follows the story of Edith, the last surviving member of the not-so-lucky Finch family, who was believed to be cursed. The Finches had the fame of dying very young, which had haunted this family since its early beginnings — determined to uncover the family’s dark past, Edith returns to her childhood home to reconnect with her roots and to journal what she ultimately found.
In this article, we’ll discuss what really plagued them, the nature of their curse, and what remained of them, if anything, to conclude potential answers to the events of the game. If you haven’t beat it already, thread carefully as there are major spoilers ahead.
Homecoming
Edith: A lot of this isn’t going to make sense to you, and I’m sorry about that.
Edith: I’m just going to start at the beginning, with the house.
The game starts off with the player sitting on a boat, roaming in an unknown direction, holding in both hands what seems to be Edith’s diary. As soon as we start reading it, we are automatically transported into Edith’s world and memories, facing the same house where she once lived, and revisited, for the sake of finding out the truth about her family. This is where our story starts.
Edith: I lived here until I was eleven but I wasn’t allowed inside half the rooms.
Edith: As a child, the house made me uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t put into words.
If you have played the game, which I assume you have by now, then you can see how the house actively reflects and represents the Finches negligence as a whole. The way it grows on top of itself in order to fit more people: new, smaller rooms stacked on top of one another uncomfortably, even though the house is full of sealed-off, unused spaces highlights Edith’s great-grandmother’s obsession with death, partially disguised as a coping mechanism. But what role does Edie Finch play in this story? And is she the cause of the trauma that gets passed down every generation? In other words, is she perpetuating the so-called “curse”? Is it someone else, or is she just one more victim, in the end? Before discussing that, we need to take a look at how the game makes us feel throughout each flashback: by giving us power, while taking from it at the same time.
Accountability
One thing that is done exceptionally well is how and where the game decides to place you throughout the flashbacks: when facing a memory of death. In each episode, you can always tell that there is a bit of fiction blended with reality (a critical point that we will be discussing ahead), sometimes more than others, which is an interesting way of conveying the truth with a small touch of artistic expression rather than an objective point of view, as there is none.
It makes you feel like you’re one of the Finches: lets you experience their deaths as if you have full control over it, but still, what will happen to you is inevitable. Even though you can tell where the plot is leading you and certainly predict the ending to each story, it doesn’t stop it from hitting you where it hurts and leaving you sad about their loss. In fact, What Remains of Edith Finch doesn’t try to surprise you or take huge twists in their narrative, with a few exceptions: instead, it focuses on how death is forced onto this group of people one way or another, and lets you soak the frustration and loss the remaining family members had to deal with.
The choice of story-telling behind the episodes is also very well tied to each character, progressing and changing based on every generation’s problems and time in order to keep the player engaged, ranging from the use of a simple first-person point of view camera to portrait the memories, to fully fledged stories told in the format of a comic book.
The elephant in the room
As we’ve stated before, these episodes are everything but objective recollections of the events, which makes the game’s nature incredibly open to interpretation: it keeps you guessing, from the moment its characters are first introduced to its very ending what this “curse” really is, and how it is displayed. The house where you investigate is filled with small clues, which tend to point in one or two directions, depending on the way you look at things. Still, I think there are three ways to look at it: three possible answers to what really happened to the Finches.
The Curse is Real
One thing that we know for sure, is that this element of fiction present in all stories may well be the fruit of Edith’s distortion as the narrator. Even then, it leaves some space to theorize about the presence of the supernatural here. Its root? the old house.
During the flashbacks, it is clear that the Finches are, in general, plagued by their uncontrollable imagination. Still, in some cases, this latent aspect of their personalities might well be explained as a consequence of their age (Gregory), or a by-product of their current situation (Lewis). These states of daydreaming were also consequences of childlike mistakes in other stories, like Molly’s food poisoning. But still, could someone or something be toying with their mind? Making them fragile, and possibly, feeding off of them?
The family’s oldest member, Odin Finch was already quite intrigued with the events of death. He even wrote two books about it, as we can see next to his wall photograph.
In his story, it is explained to us how the curse dates a long way back, which is the catalyzer behind the decision to leave their country and sail to the US. While doing so, Odin still decides to bring his house on the boat, failing to realize that the curse could be, somehow, related to it. Even after the boat sinks, the original house’s remains and wreckage still sit close to the newer house built later by Sven. Here, we make the assumption that these events are tied to it, mainly due to what we discover in Edie’s flashback, one of the last memories to be explored in the game. What was it that she saw in the old house?
Edith Sr: I’ve seen that house every day of my life
Edith Sr: But that night a lot came back to me… or should I say… I came back to them… things I can’t even explain-
The light that flashes at the end of her story, brutally interrupted by Dawn subtly tells us what we need to know. She came face to face with that presence, something that she had not confronted in a very long time, but in some way or another, was forever present in their minds. I think this hypothesis becomes more reasonable once you take a deeper look at Molly’s flashback. It is true that Molly’s death can be explained by what she ate that night, at least the hallucinations that took place. But what she hallucinated, the way she described the presence of this monster getting close to her — pointing out how she would be so delicious, are thoughts that could stem from this external force, creeping onto her. If we apply this same logic to other family members, it’s easier to see how the monster could be tempting them, leaving them consumed by their desires. Like Calvin, who wanted to fly. Or Lewis, whose maladaptive daydreaming and deep desire to escape eventually led to suicide. The day Edith was born, Grandma Edie saw the old house being lit once again, implying some kind of link between the Finches’ path and the house’s influence. In her last vision, she seems to finally realize what that means. Or does she?
Keeping the Finches’ imagination prominent was a key factor for them to be so easily tempted by this curse. It runs in the family. From this point of view, one could say that their real fragility was their imagination, as that was the realm where the monster could exert its influence. But where are they destined for it? Or was there someone actively facilitating these tragedies? Let’s take a closer look at Edie then.
Edie’s most notable, and most well-depicted personality traits were both her obsession with death, as well as her tendency to romanticize and bend the family stories — in a creepy, terrifying way too. The obsession with shrines and how she was responsible for starting the family’s cemetery. The way she would start painting the portraits for each family member long before they were dead, like she was counting on it. Edith even admits that the last time she saw Edie was while she was painting her own granddaughter's portrait. The poor girl was 10 at the time, but her Senior was already prophesying her death.
Later in the game, someone else starts picking up on these strange behaviors, and also sees danger in them:
Edie: That thing you’re afraid of isn’t going to end when you leave the house! Edith has a right to know these stories!
Dawn: My children are dead because of your stories!
Why does Dawn blame Edie then? And most importantly, why does she highlight her stories as the cause of her children’s death?
I think that the constant falsification of the family’s deaths and the wonder that their fictional side left on the family was instigating the Finches’ already prominent imagination. Milton, who disappeared and was already investigating the secrets of the house fell victim to the same fate, wandering off into the unknown. And most recently, Lewis. Bent by this monster’s influence, their children were an easy target for this overwhelming curse, which only had its job made easier by Edie, who conditioned them to a household full of death, mystery, and dreams, leading them to their inevitable destiny.
The Curse is Edie
But what if there’s no actual curse in play? The theory before mentioned relies highly on the fact the old house is the root of a supernatural entity, capable of bending minds and distorting reality. But is there the need for something so far-fetched to justify what really happened? What if the villain in this story came in a more humanoid form? What if it is just… Edie. This theory was discussed thoroughly in MatPat’s video so make sure to check it out!
This is also one of the most popular theories that I came across on the internet, so you may have already heard of it somewhere else. Still, let’s give it a go.
The first thing to notice is the age of the family members at their respective death: most die at a very young age, but… Grandma Edie? She managed to live quite a long life, despite everything, and that is enough to raise a concern about whether this curse was even real, or affecting her.
We’ve already discussed her fascination with death, but things get creepier once we dive deep into her actions. Her bedroom, the one we visit early in the game is full of evidence that may seem harmless at first, but after finishing the game, looking back on it is almost frightening.
Edith: One summer, they evacuated the Island but Edie refused to go. For a few weeks, she was a celebrity.
We already knew Edie had a knack for attention, but how far would she go to remain relevant?
Edith: Edie gave a big interview about a moleman living under the Finch house. My mom was furious.
Wonder who that moleman is (it’s Walter, by the way): we’ll get to it in a minute.
If we take a closer look at Edie’s room, we’ll see a picture of her husband Sven falling off the slide he was building, which was most certainly his moment of death. Now, who could be taking that photo? And why would Edie keep the image of such a tragic moment in her own room? Could she be the one behind his death? Her fixation on death becomes rapidly darker once we take a good look at their children’s stories.
To start off, we could say that Edie intentionally killed Molly by locking her in her room, hungry, without anything to eat. This led to food poisoning, which ultimately killed her. Unlike Molly’s death story, however, her siblings’ death cannot be explained as straightforward.
Then Barbara follows. Barbara became the real star of the family for a few years. As soon as we were first presented with her story, various questions popped into my mind: Why was the story of her death published in magazines, if she was not even famous anymore; and why did it seem so heavily fictionalized? And once again, why would Edie, her own mother of all people, keep such a gruesome and tragic representation of her daughter’s death at home?
The comic was full of unimaginable details, even though there was only one eye-witness: Walter, who locked himself on the basement and never spoke again. So, from where did the plot come up? And who made the story public in the first place?
If we revisit Grandma Edie’s bedroom, the answer pop’s right in front of our eyes. “Barbara Concepts”. Yes, “Barbara Concepts”. The book that you see right there. Collection of made-up stories for Barbara’s death to release and cover up the real accident. But why do I think Edie was the culprit? Well, Walter tells us that.
When we experience his story, there’s one particular line that supports this hypothesis:
Walter: I always expected to be dead tomorrow. But if you wait long enough, you’ll get used to anything.
Walter: Even a monster, on the other side of the door, starts to feel normal. Almost… friendly.
There was only one person on the other side of the door. The one who fed him. The one who in their limited capacity, took care of him. But he still refers to them as a monster. The one who traumatized him in the first place: the killer, from Barbara’s story. Grandma Edie, that is.
And he was scared. So scared of her, that monster, that he couldn’t stand to face her again. So scared, that he dug up a hole on the back side of the shelter to run: instead of leaving through the door.
It doesn’t matter how Edie killed Barbara or if it was even intentional. It was enough to break Walter, so we can only assume she was guilty of her tragedy.
How many of her relatives did she kill? Did she also kill Walter, the only witness, and then try to cover up the incident with a train accident? (important to say that trains were also one of the things Walter had an appreciation for, which could have served as inspiration).
Maybe we would be stretching this theory too thin in order to make Edie the culprit of every death. Even though there could possibly be some truth in it, there’s another way to look at Finches’ past. From a more objective lens… with grounded assumptions. One last theory of what could be behind it all.
There is no Curse
I think that the true, long-running curse this family had was negligence, and maybe lack of awareness. Possibly some mental diseases too, which are common to pass from one generation to the next. This idea that something is being passed down from one family member to another is always present from the start of the game: even Odin Finch, founder of the family as we know it brought his home from Norway to sail it across the Atlantic all the way to America. See, even he had his own baggage from the past. At least, that’s what I think the developers were trying to tell us.
Lewis’s death was caused by his depression and mental state. Milton was constantly encouraged to wander around the house by his Grandma, who knew no better, and with his wild spirit set loose, it was only a matter of time. Gus was left behind in the storm, and Gregory drowned, both unsupervised. Just like Calvin, who was playing with fire on that swing, built irresponsibly near the cliff. Sam, who got caught in an unfortunate timing, just like his Dad.
All these stories could have been prevented. But the lack of attention, awareness, and good judgment led them yet again to another tragedy.
One thing about this game is that it is always trying to keep you guessing on what could be causing the events. The way the flashbacks are presented, the little references and sinister objects, scattered around the house. Just like the Finches’, we too look for ways to solve this curse. And because of that, we fail, just like they did.
If they had taken the time to address their own issues first. Their own intellectual tendencies. Their faults and behavior. They could have prevented it. By putting all this energy into an imaginary curse, creating these romanticized stories, and fuelling this idea, they ended up sabotaging themselves.
Edith: But now I’m worried the stories themselves might be the problem. Maybe we believed so much in a family curse… we made it real.
And so it was. As real as It could get. In the end, despite what you think the curse’s origin was, I’m glad the answer was not given at all. The uncertainty, up until the end, is extremely important for us to feel just like the Finches did — conflicted.
Forever the Finches will struggle. It’s up to Edith’s child, to make the needed adjustments. And for once, use the stories that he was left with as cautionary tale. Because stories, as tragic and dangerous as they are, is all that remained of that family.
All that remained of Edith Finch: with the power to decide if there’ll be a new cycle, or a new beginning.
