chaz k

Was the killer the old guy or the blonde? Was it all a dream? What was the hospital scene at the end all about?

TomOpus

Did you check the Movie Talk forum?

This might help

Slayer2005

The blonde girl was the killer. She was the old guy. She's simply a multiple personality lunatic.

I suppose that the last scene was simply to make her seem creepier because she could sense the presence of the girl without actually seeing/hearing her.

maingon

i hated the ending of this movie, everything was pretty good up till the last 20 minutes or so

caligulathegod

She's telling the story, but she's an unreliable narrator. There's hints of this thoughout the movie, but most miss them and get pissed at the seemingly out of nowhere ending. It takes a second or third viewing, and even then it cheats, because the story isn't told objectively but subjectively through her point of view.

The real problem is that twists are overused anymore, so this film's twist is kind of cliche' regardless of whether it was telegraphed or not.

HistoryProf

you're new, so we won't kill you, but this has been discussed TO DEATH in previous threads....please see the search button atop the screen and use it.

joliom

You're exactly right about the narrative being subjective in nature. That seems to be at the root of most of the complaints about it. It's a lot of "how could she be in the back of the truck if she's really driving it?" and "how could she be with her friend at the same time the little boy gets shot in the field?". She's dissociative. Half of what you see is purely her warped sense of reality. You have to assume that there are some losses of time that she is unaware of and in which she is performing many of the actions that would be necessary for everything to take place the way it does. And we are seeing things through the eyes of not just a psychotic, but one particular personality of that psychotic...

NatrlBornThrllr

The story that's shown on screen doesn't make sense: her being in two places at once, doing things that only the huge male killer could do (such as carrying people around, pushing that large piece of furniture across the room with enough velocity to decapitate a man, and so forth). The film explains away all of this by pointing out that, just as you guys have said, she's telling the audience her subjective recollection of the events...and anything is possible in her subjective story since it's all in her mind.

So, that's the explanation. Some people buy it and love the film, taking it as a look into the mind of a girl with a broken psyche. Others feel that it's a lazy, overused, copout explanation...and the only way that the writers could manage to make their twist ending make any sort of sense. I'm in the latter of the two camps, feeling that a poorly told, nonsensical story is just that: a poorly told nonsensical story...whether it comes from the mind of a psychotic woman or not.

But, that's pretty much it. The entire film is her recollection of the events. She's trying to paint herself as the hero, even though she was anything but. Whether or not the film works for you is a whole other discussion.

-JP