7 movies with open endings that no one understood
For the 40th anniversary of The Shining, Stanley Kubrick's cult horror film.<url> has compiled a selection of films with the most ambiguous endings. Beware of spoilers if you have not watched the pictures from this list.
Alex Garland's sci-fi thriller inspired by Solaris leaves a lot of questions after the finale. The action of "Annihilation" takes place in the near future, when a meteorite falls on the Earth, creating a special field around itself that refracts everything that falls outside its boundaries, including the human genetic code.
The picture shows a parallel with cancer, like an alien field, cancer invades the human body imperceptibly, modifying its cells. At the end, the main character (Natalie Portman) is forced to fight with her own clone and defeats him. However, the abnormal zone still has an effect on her — this can be seen by the flickering in her eyes.
For many, this frame became an extra proof that the clone still returned, and not the original version. However, Garland does not focus on a glass of water for nothing. The heroine's husband, played by Oscar Isaac, has water stained with blood after one sip, and she herself remains crystal clear. Water, as another symbol of refraction, clearly reflects the true essence of the characters in the film.
Another film adaptation — this time from the French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve with Jake Gyllenhaal in the title role. The plot revolves around a history teacher named Anthony, who is unhappy in his marriage with his pregnant wife Helen. One day, the hero meets a man named Adam, who looks like himself like two drops of water.
"The enemy" — the film itself is not for those who like transparent plots. Almost every element of it is a metaphor associated with the unconscious of the main character. Adam demonstrates Anthony's dark side, his secret and vicious desires. The double gets a mistress, with whom he symbolically dies during an accident on the road.
In the end, Anthony is reunited with his wife, although he understands that nothing will come of it. Helen is also aware of this, so at the end we see the transformation of a woman into a giant spider, personifying the feminine principle (according to Freud) and luring the main character into a web of unfreedom.
In David Fincher's psychological thriller, an "exemplary" husband named Nick Dunn (Ben Affleck) turns out to be a suspect in the kidnapping and murder of his own wife Amy, played by Rosamund Pike. As the story progresses, it turns out that everything is fine with Amy, and her unexpected disappearance was an insidious plan to take revenge on Nick for numerous infidelities.
The film ends with Amy voluntarily returning to her husband and announcing her pregnancy. Nick, realizing that he was one step away from a death sentence, takes his wife back and ignores the thoughts of divorce that have tormented him for many years.
Not everyone liked such a gloomy ending. Many could not understand the motivations of the hero who remained next to his psychopathic wife. In fact, the suffering daddy issues Nick just turned out to be a hostage of the situation. If he had left, Amy would never have allowed him to see the child he wanted so much. Moreover, most likely, she would have turned Nick into a monster in the eyes of the baby.
The Oscar-winning film by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu fooled the audience until the very end, without answering the question whether the image of the bird-man chasing the main character played by Michael Keaton is real. Initially, it seems that Birdman is just an illusion symbolizing his subconscious.
However, when at the end the hero who received the long-awaited recognition jumps out of the window, it becomes clear that, most likely, he died. At the same time, the look of the daughter performed by Emma Stone, directed to the heavens, hints that he, like a bird, rushed into the sky.
The audience has at least three hypotheses that explain the ending of the film. Inarritu did not confirm any of them. According to the first, everything that was happening was an illusion, the second claims that the character Stone simply saw her father as he saw himself — a free superhero.
In Martin Scorsese's surreal noir "The Island of the Damned", Leonardo DiCaprio's character Teddy Daniels arrives on a mysterious island to investigate the disappearance of a patient of a psychiatric clinic.
In the course of the plot, the true purpose of the hero's arrival becomes clear — in fact, he wants to find a maniac named Andrew Leddis, who killed his wife Dolores. At the end of the picture, Teddy realizes that he has been looking for himself all this time. After all, Andrew Leddis is himself, and it is he who is responsible for the death of his wife. Unable to accept reality, the hero agrees to perform a lobotomy.
After viewing, many people had doubts — is the main character really so crazy? Some are convinced that everything that happens on the island was part of a skillful production, and Teddy is really a detective who was played a cruel joke. Martin Scorsese did not refute any of the versions.
Steve McQueen's highly social drama tells the story of an employee of a prestigious company named Brandon (Michael Fassbender). He has one vicious addiction — the love of porn. In addition, Brandon tends to have only casual and non-burdensome sexual relationships. All this eventually begins to destroy his life — the hero can not build a relationship with a woman he really loves.
In the finale, Brandon meets a girl in the subway — he noticed her at the beginning of the film, but then she was wearing a ring. Now the stranger is free and already takes the initiative to get acquainted herself. Many perceived the ending in two ways: on the one hand, Brandon could again plunge headlong into another affair, on the other — this acquaintance could serve as the beginning for a new relationship.
In any case, the further fate of these two remains behind the scenes. In this regard, everyone has a chance to independently decide what "Shame"is about-about the destructive power of addictions or about the desire to fight for their happiness to the last.
A film about lucid dreams has long remained a cinematic dream of Christopher Nolan. In order to shoot this picture, he agreed to work on a new trilogy about Batman. However, the wait was worth it — "The Beginning" became a real hit, everything was fine in it: the script, the production, the special effects; and a whole hundred fan theories grew around the finale.
Nolan himself, it seems, was dissatisfied with such a hype. According to him, in the end, the main character does not care where he is — in a dream or in reality. He just stops asking himself this question: Cobb left the feeling of guilt in front of his wife and just allowed himself to be happy.
Not so long ago, actor Michael Caine also said that according to the director's idea, if the hero remains in the frame, then everything that happens belongs to reality, if he is not there, then it is a dream.
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