What We Hide (Spider & Jessie, 2025) Movie Review & Ending Explained: Do Spider and Jessie get separated in the end?

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Mckenna Grace has been a professional actor for over a decade now, but most of her roles have been in the supporting cast. Some of those roles, as people online have pointed out, have been as younger versions of white, female protagonists. Apart from these roles, her work has primarily been in lighthearted comedy dramas. Unlike them, ‘What We Hide’ (Original title: Spider & Jessie) offers a peek into her wider acting range. Here, she plays a 15-year-old girl trying to survive on her own after a horrible familial tragedy.

Through her, the film partially analyzes a broken bond between a mother and a daughter. However, unlike the unbearably cheesy and pointless rendition in ‘Regretting You,’ there’s a genuine emotional depth to the relationship in Dan Kay’s film. Kay, who wrote and directed the project, approaches a tale of sisterhood with enough restraint that it might make you overlook some of the writing flaws in his script.

Grace plays Spider, a precocious teenager whose precocious nature seems like a direct result of her unstable family and untrustworthy parents. A tragedy propels her life in a different direction, forcing her to reconcile its effect on her relationship with her younger sister, Jessie.

Spoilers Ahead

What We Hide (Spider & Jessie, 2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:

What happens in ‘What We Hide’?

The film begins with two sisters, Spider (Mckenna Grace) and Jessie (Jojo Regina), next to their mother lying in a shed. It’s implied that the mother has lost her life, but the reason isn’t clear. Spider covers her mother’s body, while Jessie unhooks her locket from her neck to keep it as a memory. Although a traumatic situation for anyone their age, Jessie seems emotional, whereas Spider seems rather angry, which makes you wonder what happened between them before. She also tells Jessie not to tell anyone anything about it. Since then, they both hold on to this secret wherever they go in their small town.

The day after their mother dies, Jessie returns from school with her friend’s mother. Spider forbids it, afraid it would expose their secret. As it all happens, their mother lies in a wooden box next to their house. Spider believes that they should keep hiding the truth because otherwise, the child services may separate her and Jessie. As a viewer, you wonder how long she can keep up the act. One day or another, people will know their situation and try to help them in any way they can.

Spider doesn’t seem naive to not realize that. Her determination feels borne out of her desperation to hold on to any form of familial warmth, which includes Jessie’s presence in her life. Even if the steps she takes to protect herself and Jessie may seem naive, she isn’t emotionally immature. So, as we see her playing almost a parent to Jessie, it feels like something she has been doing for a long time. That may as well have been the case, considering their mother’s situation.

What happened to Spider and Jessie’s mother?

Spider and Jessie’s mother was suffering because of her drug addiction, which also took a toll on her daughter’s life. That’s likely why Spider has a complicated reaction to her loss. Unlike Jessie, she doesn’t look emotional seeing her mother in that situation. Even before, she may have had to step up as a responsible person in Jessie’s life, given their mother’s untrustworthiness and a second parent’s absence. It leaves her to act like a grown-up years before she would have had to in another course. That makes her resent her mother, which reflects in her conversations with Jessie.

Jessie remembers their mother fondly, but Spider doesn’t share that feeling. In a particularly painful scene, she recalls their mother’s irresponsible behavior when she was pregnant with Jessie. She mentions how it left Jessie with major respiratory issues. Later on, these issues put them in a difficult situation, when they are left with no other option but to tell the truth. Until that happens, they manage to hide it even from a social service officer who shows up at their doorstep to check on their mother and see how she’s handling her parenting duties.

Spider decides to lie, claiming their mother has gone out for a job interview at a bank, leaving them to be home by each other’s side. They convince the officer well enough to make her leave without cross-checking the information. Other than that, they face Reece (Dacre Montgomery), a violent drug dealer who may have been responsible for keeping her in the vicious loop of substance abuse. To him, Spider lies, saying her mother has gone out with a woman she doesn’t know, implying she wants to be in rehab. Still, he keeps showing up in her life, causing trouble as he must have done before.

How does Spider fend off Reece?

Reece expects Spider’s mother to return to him soon after he can’t find her at her house. Since she doesn’t show up even days later, he threatens Spider to pay what her mother owes him. With no source of income and no parent to rely on, Spider struggles to find ways to pay the amount. Shortly before that, she had spent most of their savings on food to cheer up her sister. It may have been her way to restore a balance in their healthy relationship, but it affects her financial situation. So, after Reece threatens her, she resorts to desperate ways to get the amount, which include selling their mother’s locket and selling a digital camera that a friend lent her to practice on.

During this time, this friend seems like the one good thing that happened in her life. Cody (Forrest Goodluck), who works at a local grocery store, takes a picture of her on his film camera and shows it to her later. That’s how she gets interested in photography, joining him to click some photos somewhere nearby. He recognizes her talent and gifts her a digital camera to practice with. She sells the same camera to return what her mother owes to Reece. Still, even after paying the debt, Reece remains determined to be a nuisance in her life.

As it all happens, Ben (Jesse Williams), the local sheriff, remains concerned about them. He had known their mother for a long time. So, he knew how her situation affected her daughters. That remains the primary reason behind his concern. Even days after the loss, he doesn’t realize what happened to her. Spider manages to hide the truth from him until she can’t.

What We Hide (Spider & Jessie, 2025) Movie Ending Explained:

Spider realizes that she can’t keep lying about her mother for too long and starts accepting the inevitable after a handful of attempts at keeping the secret. In order to prevent her and Jessie’s separation, she decides to create fake IDs. Around this time, she learns that she must be at least 18 years old to be Jessie’s legal guardian, which would ensure their co-existence. That’s why she seeks help from Dennis (Brad Beyer), a local who creates such IDs. He agrees to help her without pay, knowing her shaky financial situation.

Around this time, she is forced to drive Jessie to a nearby hospital on her own. Yet, the staff doesn’t tell her any details about Jessie’s condition unless an adult guardian is present. Luckily, the sheriff arrives there to help her in this case, but he still doesn’t learn what happened to her mother. Spider returns home with Jessie, and soon after, once she gets the fake IDs, decides to run away with her. However, Jessie refuses to leave like that to start a new life. As they argue, Reece shows up at the doorstep. He breaks in and threatens to cause harm.

Spider and Jessie defend themselves, making him leave. After that, Spider is forced to contend with their futures. Since Jessie doesn’t want to leave, Spider decides not to hold on to the secret any longer. Soon, the police show up there, and so does Ben, who stays by their side. Earlier, while in the hospital, Spider asked for his help, wanting him to ensure she wouldn’t get separated from Jessie.

Do Spider and Jessie get separated as Spider feared would happen?

The ending shows Spider and Jessie joined by locals and well-wishers at their mother’s funeral. It doesn’t clarify what that means for the sisters and whether they get separated or not after revealing what they had been hiding for weeks. Yet, it implies Spider coming to terms with this new phase in her life. The final moments show her trying on her mother’s locket, which might be a step in her processing her loss. Until then, grief appeared only as an undercurrent in her life, plagued mainly by worries about their future.

The very act of using that locket might be her way to show forgiveness, maybe to hold on to the good instead of being dragged down by the bad memories, now that she has a healthier support system. Since Ben is the sheriff, he might be able to help her and Jessie find a home together. He might choose to be their legal guardian as well, given Spider’s close friendship with his daughter. However, the ending doesn’t clearly say that, and it expects us to reach our own conclusions about their fates.

What We Hide (Spider & Jessie, 2025) Movie Review:

‘What We Hide’ tells the story of two sisters who face a string of challenges as they hide what happened to their mother. So, the trailer paints it in a melodramatic tone, leaving an understated psychological drama seem like a sentimental potboiler. Instead of focusing on the themes of sisterhood and mother-daughter relationship, which the film is about, it suggests that this is a cat-and-mouse thriller with Dacre Montgomery and Jesse Williams feeling like two sides of the puzzle. It implies something vaguely sinister, which is far from what the film offers.

The bad, corny marketing is nowhere close to the nuanced portrayal of sisterhood that the film depicts through its central characters. Most of the credit for why the film works goes to the performances, where Mckenna Grace explores her range farther than usual, while Jojo Regina becomes a revelation. For a film that relies on them to communicate much of its emotional subtext, their grounded performances leave you rooting for them even when they don’t make the most sensible choices.

Grace is great at portraying Spider’s inner strength, paired with her constant turmoil, leaving us with an impression with shades wider and deeper than the evident resentment. Regina is a strong scene partner to her, essential for a film that works as a two-hander. Dan Kay’s direction is also evocative, as he relies on sustained dramatic moments instead of shaping its conventional bits in a conventional manner. Yet, his script is undercooked in certain areas, especially in its depiction of people dealing with substance abuse.

Kay certainly underlines the systemic issues related to such families, often leaving people to have no agency over their own lives. He does that without drawing attention to them — in a way that would feel like someone patting themselves on the back simply for stating those flaws. Yet, that doesn’t negate how he leaves the mother present only through her enabler (also a cliche of a character despite a sincere performance) or the negative impact of her actions. For a film that uses it as a central theme, it does not do a good enough job at highlighting its complexities.

It’s also strange how it never speaks about the other parent’s absence while leaving the mother solely at the heart of the blame. Still, where the film succeeds is its naturalistic rendering of the sisters’ relationship, pushing it further than reductive tearjerkers that place helplessness at the core. So, it is better a film about sisterhood and coming of age in a broken family than one that offers a sensible depiction of people suffering from addiction.