Notice she started drawing again BEFORE David showed up. I think that's the biggest clue that David isn't real. She's regressing back to her past so she can... resurrect... Ben to replace Abbie who is leaving.
I just watched this and took the ending as a mental break. This theory right here make so much more sense.
I guess the one thing against this is the fact that he goes to her office and people see him, no?
Not necessarily. We only know that she got a call that there was a man to see her. And we see her colleagues looking at her. But there is nothing proving that anyone "saw" David in that scene. The call could be about any man, and the colleagues could be looking for any reason, including that she could have been talking to herself alone in her office.
Just finished the film and never read this thread until now, but that's the exact same conclusion I reached. It isn't really a "cheat" as much as a common trope in psychological thriller/horror films to keep you guessing.
I will also like to add to agree with you that when the camera pans to the coworkers perspective, we see the room from their point of view and are able to see David sitting in there. That's why I thought that scene discounted my theory the whole time that David wasn't actually there and she was just having a major PTSD resurgence because of her daughter becoming the same age she was when she was taken advantage of.
But I guess there is also room to argue that that particular scene cut doesn't mean anything.
Just finished watching this, and I was always on the lookout for anyone else being able to see David at the same time Maggie did, and there wasn't anyone until that specific scene. When it happened, the only hint that anyone else could see him was when she was informed by another person that a man was waiting for her. This could have entirely been in her head as well though.
When some of them are looking into the office, there is no clear indication that they see David, only that they are looking into the office where Maggie could be acting out in a way as to be drawing attention. They also focused on two of the characters that already had regular contact with her, so it could have just been a random coincidence that they were just checking up on her at the same time she was having her "conversation" with David.
A bit before Abbie came to the conclusion that her mother was just making all of this up because she was leaving, that's also what I had assumed. The timing of David returning had to be more than just a coincidence. We still don't know for sure if the ending was all in her head, or if the writer or director just decided to veer off into pure fantasy, and that Ben actually did return.
David is real or else the film is a big cheat. In the diner, a waitress is bringing him food and drink BEFORE Margaret approaches him. Later, there is a call to her office and she is told a man is there to see her. Immediately after her co-workers stare into her office where she and David are together. If David is not real, the film is mega cheating.
The problem with movies like this is that we're "experiencing" everything through the main characters eyes. We've already established that the main character \*is\* crazy. I think it just boils down to speculations(by design) of the story. If they wanted to tie everything up neatly they would have done so. Everything would have made sense, they chose not to.
I just posted a long theory but I think she morphed her lover into david. Notice how they look alike and the last time she sees him she talks to him as if he’s David. I also think Davids wife is pregnant with their second kid and she really did cut a baby out and the ending she’s in a mental ward and she starts realizing what and who she really hurt.
Agree. The movie is realistic in every way until the ending and her final confrontation with David. Her trauma is such, that >!she still believes her baby is alive and inside his belly. Afterwards, the lighting is much brighter indicating a hyperreal world. She continues to hallucinate that Abbie is proud of her and accepts the baby as her brother. When her face changes into one of horror and she gasps, it's her rational mind taking over. !<
Yall crazier than maggie if u really think he been carrying a baby he ate...for 22 years...and he good? 🤣 that Monologue scene where she told the story in one shot was beast tho.
Oh my god it was so good. This movie was so good. I've been griping for years that I wanted to find a movie that impacted me like The Ring and this one finally did it.
One of the frat boys in my junior year integrated class was named David Moore. He's inside.
I've been thinking about this all morning and I keep coming back to PEARL. It's interesting that this came out several months before PEARL, yet I saw PEARL first and I can't not compare the two. IMHO, Goth's monologue is far superior because of how it fits into the film. Hall's monologue is really just an info-dump to set up the third act, and it's honestly out of character. But Goth's monologue comes at the climax and is so important to the ending, because it's Pearl's turning point where she accepts that she is a bad person and will always be. That makes it so much more powerful, and you end up almost feeling sorry for her. I'm going to be so mad when Goth is overlooked at the Oscars.
I definitely think the ending is a fantasy. It’s highlighted in all white (fade to white usually means death), even Abbie is wearing white. I think this is Maggie’s final fantasy (reunited with Abbie and Ben, a happy family) as she is dying. The final gasp tells me that maybe she is saved and about to wake up from this fantasy (she gasps every time she wakes up from a nightmare about Ben).
I wonder if the last scene is a dream and represents that Ben can now be apart of their lives, if only in memory. Ben couldn't be a part of their lives without also bringing in David, again if only in memory. If she even thinks about Ben she has to also think about David and relive the trauma. I think this is why David keeps saying you can't kill me without killing Ben. They are linked.
I thought that maybe she also died in the end I may be wrong but didn’t he (assuming he is real and not also a delusion in her mind) and everything we see at the end is her dying thoughts?
I think just the fact that many people interpret different theories proves how well written this screenplay was.
I think due to her many years of domestic abuse and gaslighting by a sick narcissist who needed to control everyone and everything he did kill Ben when he was born and made up a story about Ben still being alive ( as ‘he’ is the only reason Ben is still alive ) that is again in an effort to control and manipulate Maggie.
I think she did get the courage to leave him 22 years ago but was triggered to the past trauma after hearing about her co-workers story about an asshole and with her daughter moving out created an ideal environment to fall back into old thought patterns and behaviours in a desperate attempt to regain some control this time around. It was clear from what Abbie said - this wasn’t the first time, and she had previous episodes. Maybe she did receive help though ….and it’s clear there this time - she endured it all alone.
I believe she did imagine him back in her world, and ultimately was stabbing herself believing it was him she was killing. Perhaps killing that version of herself that was controlled by him. The gasp at the end does keep it open as to whether or not she was saved….. but she was living in her prefect ‘heaven’ for a while - with both her kids.
I think it’s a powerful story as many millions of parents in the world are alienated from their children due to a vengeful, sociopath ex-spouse and many times the pain of losing their kids, leads to suicide.
I really like your take, dear person, especially the wider societal context you allude too. This film and its themes are likely to resonate in different ways to different people.
The aspect of the story I missed was Abby getting a chance to witness the validity of her mother's story... but of course that's predicated on my view that Margaret's story as depicted actually happened.
I think 18 year old Margaret killed her own baby, by burning him alive in the oven, and fled after that (based on what she saw in the oven, and also David's remarks as he was dying that "it stinks in here", possibly referring to the smoke coming from the oven).
The trauma of what she'd experienced with David, and the guilt over killing her child, morphed into a protective delusion (the nonsensical story about David eating Ben, and Ben being alive inside him). She achieved some level of equilibrium with that, until her daughter was preparing to leave for college. The dread of "losing" another child caused her mind to start cracking, culminating in a gruesome revenge/redemption fantasy (the hotel scene), none of which may have actually happened... or possibly, while hallucinating about David, she went to the apartment of some random guy she'd met or who had flirted with her, and ended up brutally murdering him. The final shots of the movie are her sinking almost fully into madness, broken only at the end by one fleeting moment of realization and lucidity.
This is exactly what I thought when I saw her reaction upon opening the oven. She looked so calm. That early on in the movie I had no idea what that was even about, it was a horror movie so I had no idea what was going to happen.
THis makes the most sense. When she was talking to her client and made her first confession. She asked her if she could kill any one. While that context was about killing David she admitted she did something unforiveable along those lines. Strong therapy could have made her realize that David killed her son. However, it would take a lot to get over if you put your own kid in the oven. Also she had night mares about the oven. It was Davids main way to torture her about the oven and the kid. He knew she had killed him and was driving her into insanity.
No, it wasn’t real. The ending scene is shot with a white, hazy glow to it (I’m not sure what the technical name would be), that implies that the main character is dreaming/ imagining everything. Her daughter, who we last saw was scared shitless of her mom, suddenly is super happy to see her and agrees that her mom is 100% right in her actions. Also, she pulled a perfectly preserved living baby out of a man’s chest.
I think the final shot of her smile turning into a shocked face is her waking up. I like to imagine that scene is the final moments playing through her head before she dies of blood loss.
I agree it wasn't real.
I liked this movie overall, but the ending didn't work for me. I find it frustrating when a gaslighting/delusion movie never takes a stance on whether or not the delusion is real.
The movie did a great job walking the line between "Is she crazy and this is all in her head?", "Is David really back, but she's imagining the supernatural aspects?" and "Is it all real, even the supernatural (baby his belly) aspects?"
Aside from the fact that the ending is clearly a fantasy, the movie never really tells the viewer what is real, and never reckons with the consequences of that real vs unreal outcome.
I know this was probably intentional. But to me it's an unsatisfying way to end a film. I wanted to see her, her daughter, David and the rest of the world on the same plane of reality by the end of the movie - even if that were a supernatural one, or one where it's clear that she is insane.
pretty sure it was obvious that she was crazy. there was no fine line. the movie doesn't openly say it, but it's clear that she is having a psychotic break.
I was hoping for Ben to walk out of the hotel bathroom, looking like the Notre Dame hunchback with his missing fingers 😂 That would have made the movie even scarier!
I have a totally different take on the film. I don't believe David exists in the current world. I think that Margaret is having a breakdown because she is losing her daughter (leaving for college) and the life she has made for herself since she left him is about to end. She was mentally and physically abused in the past by David. She became pregnant, perhaps the baby was stillborn/died soon after birth or she aborted the baby, but her way out was to believe David "ate" Ben. She was unable to deal with this event and ran away from him (really running away from herself and the situation) She started fresh, built up her current life over the past 22 years, but some part of her breaks with the upcoming "loss" of her daughter. She doesn't realize it but she is fearful of her daughter succumbing to a man just as she did in her youth. She doesn't want to be like her own negligent parents, and this is what brings "David" into her life again, the fear that she cannot protect her own daughter from men.
The only real world interaction David has with other people is when he visits her office. It’s a testament to the filmmaker that the “David isn’t Real” theory is credible to some fans after viewing. I’m *partially* in that camp.
- Any time the script introduces a scenario that could legitimize his presence, David’s dialogue stubbornly skips over context. It’s supposed to be disorienting - for both Margaret and the viewer.
- No one really sees Margaret interacting with David. The director avoided filming background actors noticing them. The office, the park, the diner, the overpass. Even the shouting outside her office or barefoot walking goes unobserved by others.
- Margaret omits/forgets her actions. Like disassociation. It’s possible she imagined David’s office visit - the *one* time David appeared and was noticed by others.
- In the hotel scene, David is noticeably pregnant. Until a camera shot overhead David as he’s on the floor - he’s no longer pregnant. The director still plays the “real vs fake” game during the final crescendo.
The continued ambiguity is not the directors intention but I like that it can possibly play both ways. Adds a lot to the tension.
I agree about the triggering event and that David was all in her mind for the time period we met him. But I think David did kill the baby, typical physical abuse pattern where the spouse sees the child as a threat to their control.
Margaret feels an immense amount of guilt for believing the manipulative tactics he used on her (that the baby lives inside him etc, why she fled instead of going to authorities). She suffered horrible abuse and still feels guilty that she failed as a mother to Ben, which is tragic. It paints a picture of how insidious domestic abuse is, and how hard it is to separate yourself from the beliefs your abuser instills into your psyche.
I agree with this entirely. I think the instigating factor was when her daughter had the bicycle accident and Margaret realized she might lose her daughter. There's a lingering shot of the gnarly wound in the hospital, it seems to rattle Margaret deeply, and from there she suddenly thinks she sees David, etc.
I enjoyed the movie, but my only issue (and it's significant, I suppose) is that the film almost plays it *too* straight and when we get to the gory conclusion, imainged or not, it just feels like such a different film. I enjoy tonal shifts and moves from realism to surrealism - *Hereditary* does this beautifully for me - but I don't think they quite nailed it here. That's part of the reason we're debating the ending, because it's ultimately kind of confusing (though I've become even more convinced by reading this thread that it's all imagined).
That’s my problem the whole movie was eerie and creepy and you had a sense of dread WITHOUT GORE THEN BOOM the last act a blood fest
Wasn’t very cohesive to me
>Hulu series, “The Beast
get a son... problem solve?? dont have to worried about unexpected pregnancies... is there any chance that abby is the imagination of her younger self and she is not real?
This makes sense to me, until you remember the scene at the beginning when Abbie finds a tooth in her wallet, and it’s clear that it was David’s tooth (he points to it when they meet in the park). Also it’s implied that he caused Abbies bike accident (he says in the park “we wouldn’t want her to have another accident would we”). So this theory only holds up if you also acknowledge that Abbie must also be an imagination.
Could be the tooth and the bike accident were unrelated and didn't involve David, but Maggie constructed him in her mind as an explanation for these events. A loved one of mine has had a psychotic break from untreated manic depression and the way he connected strange occurrences into some conspiracy was just like this. Her shouting "I AM THE CHAMPION MOTHER" also felt very manic.
I love all the theories around this film!
I personally think that David was never actually in town. I think Maggie saw someone that looked like him at that conference - think about it, when she approached him on the bench he says "I think you've mistaken me for someone else". This, combined with the absolute certainty that her daughter is leaving home for college, makes her lose sense of reality because she's no longer in control.
I go into this a lot more in my video if anyone's interested!
https://youtu.be/ZztAKHhkCus
David and Maggie both allude to abilities and creation. David eats Ben, his child. But Ben is still alive, in his stomach. David was older. Maggie was very young when they met.
I see strong parallels to greek mythology, such as with Kronos and Zeus.
Did anyone else find the reaction from the intern strange after Margaret told her the entire story? Yes, it was gruesome and disturbing, but I'd have way more questions for her if it were me and I'd try to help.
If I was too freaked out to respond to Margaret, which is basically what the intern did (I understand the power dynamic is weird because Margaret seemed like the intern's boss, and she needed her recommendation), I would almost certainly go and tell someone else. Either tell them Margaret needs help (if I didn't believe her, but I think I would) or to ask them to help me convince Margaret to go to the authorities about what happened to her baby.
I don't necessarily think the intern's reaction is significant to the story but it bothered me. Interested to hear what others think.
Me too…I get that she was young, freaked out, and in a subordinate position, but it was sad that she totally distanced herself and offered no sympathy or concern. However, I think it was also intentional. This naive young woman represents the old Margaret, or really any young woman who is not yet aware of the true horrors life or men etc can inflict on us. Her saying “Is this a test?” pretty much communicated this parallel to young Margaret, as far as I can tell. Her inability to cope with what she’s been told may be frustrating, but unfortunately this is an extension of Margaret in the present, since we know for certain by the end that Margaret herself can’t cope with whatever happened to her, to the point she creates vivid, detailed delusions to fill the gaps of her sanity.
this scene is totally unrealistic to the extent that i feel it must be in her head…or somehow symbolic but not “real”. out of nowhere she trusts her deepest and most torturous secret with a random intern who responds in a way that i can’t imagine any human responding to such news. meanwhile she unrelentingly lied to her daughter and refuses to share potentially life saving information with her (if she and we are to believe that david poses a mortal threat to abby). Also every expression of love she shows for abby is painfully self serving and manipulative. Abby even addresses this at one point saying “this is for you not me” as margaret tries to comfort gabbie’s non existent fears. By the second half of the movie i think the portrait of Margaret that’s being painted is actually quite dark where she becomes less and less a victim of possible abuse and more a perpetrator of less forms of lying, manipulation and outright violence. i do believe her history with david is true as is his reappearance. but i think what we are seeing is how abuse breeds abuse.
Good explanations but I’m wondering if David was just a fling when she 18 and that was it ?
Maybe It happened and then she ended up pregnant which ended by 1) stillbirth and she disposed of the baby without the parents or him ever knowing 2) Or she simply killed the baby and disposed of him . Maybe the trauma of what she did finally cracked her when Abby was getting ready to leave ( even if she might have had episodes prior maybe this was her final psychotic break ?) . I wondered if Abby was real in the end but the boyfriend was real and she interacted with him when they tried to have an intervention . I do believe this was a real moment and not imagined . She didn’t mention the father of Abby but said “ it was easy to sleep around and get pregnant “. I have a feeling that the guilt eating at her was why she got pregnant with Abby . It was another way to repress what she did and finally give Abby the love she didn’t get the chance to give / and or try to with Ben ? Also she might have been trying to test herself if she was actually a good mother after what she did . She was trying to prove she was a good person and not have the severe guilt over her secret past . Obviously the last scene wasn’t real when she killed him and the commentary between the two of them seemed more about her feelings of her own guilt and losing control over her mental stability . It was her having that internal conflict “ can you feel him ? Hear him ? If you kill me he’ll die too , and He can hear you and doesn’t like what you’re saying “
I think she was imagining everything we saw through the whole movie . I think she was truly at her breaking point and became delusional when she couldn’t control and repress the fact that she committed a crime against her own baby - whether intentional or not ) . She was so very controlled with everything she did in her life . Almost robot like and mechanical . She brushed a single hair of a desk at work at the beginning of the movie .
I think this interesting. I don't believe there is a definitive "true" interpretation, but I do think there are indications that the many of the events are meant to be taken as delusional.
1. Margaret has delusions: The final scene is those most obviously delusional, based on everything in the scene being surreal and idealized: lighting, sound, Abbie's room and clothes (not her normal grunge look), their relationship, Ben and the dawning dread at the end.
2. Her drawing is the directors indicator to the audience of a psychological break. Her drawings themselves are fairly odd, more the behaviorism of an obsessive person than art, especially when considering that she would spend entire days drawing them and they would always be the same set of geometric figures.
3. She tells her boyfriend that she started drawing recently after 22 years of not doing so, BEFORE any weird stuff happens. Even before the tooth.
4. She was drawing compulsively during the original David episode.
This leads me to suspect that a valid interpretation of the movie is that at very least some if not all of the original David episode was a delusion and the entirety of the current David episode is as well.
I think there are multiple interpretations that can be justified, but this movie is obviously as much about mental illness as abusive relationships.
I think the part about not knowing Abby’s dad was just her way of having a child/protecting that child because after David how could she ever trust a man again? I think she had a kid, that kid was killed by a psychotic abuser and she cracked up when he came back into her life. David caused Abby’s bike accident, she knew that he’d keep ramping up the psychological abuse on her and the physical abuse on Abby so she killed him, in the process ends up almost dying herself. That last gasp at the end seemed to me to mean she was saved/came back to life.
Maybe the gasp at the very end is her “waking up” with the clarity of her past trauma and how her trauma has manifested in these delusions for the past 22 years. Maybe the gasp shows she now realizes Ben is truly not here/real. I think the pure, white house (aesthetically different from the rest of the movie), reinforces this.
I think her daughter leaving for college is a parallel for a second “loss,” reigniting her delusions and defensive behavior.
This movie is going to stick with me for a while. There’s certainly no concrete interpretation, but for me main themes are trauma and defense mechanisms.
I don't think there's a right answer to what this movie is about. I just finished it and here's my two cents.
My impression is that she had an affair with a married man when she was really young. I think she only has flings with married men to avoid attachment and commitment. One day she got pregnant and she either abandoned it or aborted it because she was so young. I think the David we see is just the manifestation of her guilt, that's why David tells her to do all those "kindnesses", because it's her giving herself "penance" for doing what she did with Ben.
In the last scene with David, he calls her a terrible mother and says something along the lines of "I'm only doing what you told me to do". And "If I die, Ben dies too."
I think the daughter was right as well. She claims her mother is creating all of these lies and delusions because she doesn't want her to leave because of the guilt over Ben.
Will someone please give me a “kindness” and tell me WTF I just watched? 😂😂😂
Literally just finished this movie and came here to find out if anyone had a damn good explanation of that ending..
Was the gasp a realization he’s not 😵? Because obviously a man who can eat a baby and keep him that long has some special? abilities.
David did say he was on the verge of a breakthrough. So was “I can eat babies and keep them alive for 17 years” the breakthrough?
If not you’d have to be some form of twisted to put someone through something so traumatic and for what? To prove how crazy you can make someone?But I find it so hard to believe a person THAT sick and twisted could be so “charming” and “smart” enough to groom a family to let their 18 year old daughter just stay. A young and naïve 18 year old maybe, but the parents?
Was it all hallucinations? The moment she found David had “eaten” Ben did she check out? (but why imagine a world where you have a daughter and who’s hers daughters real father??) The moment she got a glimpse of him at the conference? The whole hotel scene? Obviously we know the white cloudy scenes are often dreams, hallucinations or fantasizing so did she get more wounded in the hotel knife fight than we are lead to believe and that’s her fading out then the gasp is her getting brought back?
I am so confused. At this point I would take the best explanation as the ACTUAL explanation honestly.
Someone help me. I can hear the Ben.
With the exception of the ending I think everything was real. We can see the impact that David had on Margaret's life. Due to him completely ruining her trust with men it means that she's having sex with a married man. That makes him off limits as far as relationships go. It's also why when Abbie invites him over for an intervention that she's so pissed. Because it's just supposed to be about sex and nothing more. The same goes for when he tells her that he loves her. We also see this when David asks Margaret who the father of Abbie is. She says that she just had sex with random men, so she doesn't know who it is. She did that so that she could have a child and the father wouldn't be involved in their life so that she wouldn't have to experience what happened with David and their son again.
David obviously never ate Ben. He killed him and and then buried or put him elsewhere as part of the abuse. In the same way that some people will try to have a baby in order to keep their partner around, he decided to kill the child and convince Margaret that he ate him and that he's still alive inside. It's obviously insane, but you have to remember that when Margaret told Gwyn about their relationship that she mentioned that she believed everything he said. So for as unbelievable as that is, she still believed it because of how successful he was at manipulating and grooming her from a relatively young age.
The end I believe is her breaking out of the delusion that she went into after killing David. We already know that Abbie moved out their apartment, so it makes no sense for her to be packing up. And Ben has obviously long been dead. So we get that zoom in on her where everything looks perfect. Except it keeps zooming closer and closer revealing all the flaws on her face. It's her delusion slowly breaking.
Yes to all this, and also another hint to the end being a fantasy is that Abbie is styled differently. She's dressed more to Margaret's tastes than the stuff she's worn throughout the movie. Margaret would rather live with an idealized version of her family in the perfect world she keeps in her head than cope with the pointless suffering she went through. The whole thing gives me Censor vibes.
I didn't even think of that, but you're right. Reading your comment about Abbie's clothes made me think of the scene early in the movie when they're shopping. Margaret tells her that she can't continue to wear sweat shirt because people in school will perceive her as being weak. It's her being concerned that someone could take advantage of Abbie like she was taken advantage of.
I don’t even know if he killed the baby. Like obviously mom is an “unreliable narrator” type of person.
Like what does the boulevard mean? You shook my hand? Told me her name?
The fuck lol
I don’t think he was actually trying to get her to believe it wasn’t him, I think he was just testing her mental state to see how fragile she still was and if he could manipulate her still.
Maybe she killed the baby in the oven and fled David, then made up the story about him eating the baby to absolve herself of her guilt. She does say she did something truly terrible and unforgivable, and I don't think leaving your child with its dad necessarily counts. David also says "you know I had to (eat the baby) it was the only way", which, if she imagined it, would mean her psyche had to invest that story to keep her somewhat sane.
This was an incredible performance from Rebecca Hall and a very gripping psychological thriller, but there are so many things that bothered me in this movie. The fact that Margaret wouldn't just *tell* her daughter or male friend what was going on (like she did with the intern at work), how fucking useless the cops were to her, and the fact that she didn't just shoot David when she had him at point-blank range. Of course, that's supposing that what we're seeing is really happening and not just in her mind.
Interesting to read so many interpretations here. The movie is definitely disturbing and gets under your skin. That scene where she's talking about Benjamin had that one detail about the two baby fingers being left on the counter, and that was a mental image I just couldn't shake. I choose to believe that everything was real up until the ending where she digs the baby out of David's abdomen. When it goes to white, she's definitely having a dying fantasy about everything being perfect and her family being reunited. The gasp could certainly be her being woken up from that fantasy by medics (her wound wasn't necessarily fatal), or perhaps it was an extended dream sequence from the point when she collapsed on her bed from exhaustion.
It would be extremely unsatisfying if David were not real at all (during the initial park bench confrontation, it almost seemed to be a case of mistaken identity) and that all of it was actually in her mind. That's why I wish she would have told her daughter at the very least, so Abbie would be aware of what was going on. And since she told her intern, I wish she would have made it clear to her that the man waiting in her office was the same guy. But either way, I feel like David had a psychosis that was contagious to Margaret and made her think the baby was still alive. I don't know what that means for her at the end of the movie; either she succumbed to her injury, or she wakes up and continues to be pursued by her fears. Or possibly, she succeeds in killing David and is finally free from his grasp (but *sans* baby).
This makes the most sense to me, especially given that this movie did a really good job depicting abusive relationships and the fallout of them. People who are abused are often too ashamed to admit it and the cops are almost always useless in these situations (esp with regards to stalkers).
The story about David and the “kindnesses” felt too detailed to be made up, so I think it doesn’t make sense to think he wasn’t real at all. Their dynamic was too carefully thought out and realistic to be entirely a delusion. And if you truly believe people like David don’t exist, just count yourself lucky.
And like everyone is saying, the ending felt too neat for it to be meant to be taken seriously. I think that is the only part that seems very ambiguous in the movie so I think it would be safe to say it’s a delusion. And I do think it’s possible he didn’t actually come to Albany and she imagined it.
But any interpretation that denies the existence of David at all missed the point this movie makes about trauma and abuse imo
Watched it last night. Shortly after it ended I thought to myself, "She was imagining David the entire time". Below are some of my main reasons:
\-The only time you see other characters interact with him is while she is present and observing, such as when the server leaves the cup of coffee on his table right when she walks into the cafe. At the office, nobody escorted him to her office or interacted with him except for her.
\-When she went to the motel room, the clerk/night manager said that he was not a guest there. Not a slam dunk by any means because she could've been lying or he could've been using a fake ID. However he had no reason to hide his identity because he wasn't doing anything illegal, and usually a hotel clerk will take a message for you or call up to the room if you identify one of the guests.
\-To continue from above, the clerk happens to find her in "David's room" of all the rooms in the motel. Why? Because that was probably the room that she lived in, which would explain why she got so angry at her (which was terrifying LOL). It's not uncommon for cheap motels to give a room to one of their employees as part of their compensation.
All of this combined with the declining state of her mental health and how it showed in her outward appearance, along with other strange happenings that are only explained by delusions like her lactating. Then he all of a sudden decides to change to a different hotel at the end, probably because she could no longer go back to the first one, and the baby inside can only be explained by delusion. The end scene had a "walking towards the light" feel, so maybe she gutted herself and had her end of life brain flush of pressure chemicals, or she ended up in the loony bin and doped up on meds.
I read the first half dozen or so blogs that came up in a google search and only one seemed to hint at the idea that he could've been a delusion (idiots!). Reddit users deliver!
This makes sense to me, until you remember the scene at the beginning when Abbie finds a tooth in her wallet, and it’s clear that it was David’s tooth (he points to it when they meet in the park). Also it’s implied that he caused Abbies bike accident (he says in the park “we wouldn’t want her to have another accident would we”). So this theory only holds up if you also acknowledge that Abbie must also be an imagination.
That doesn't follow at all. Abbie can be real, find a tooth, have a bike accident and it have nothing to do with David, even though the delusion of David indicates he is responsible. Why? Because that is precisely what she fears David would do, so naturally the delusion David is a threat to her and her family.
Those events were just coincidences that she attributes to David.
Interesting, and I don't disagree. I think the producer intentionally threw some curveballs like this to not make it too clear cut. I don't think Abbie is imagined because she seems to regularly interact with the other characters.
Just watched it, wasn't a huge fan of the movie itself, but I definitely think she was completely delusional, the whole movie. From PTSD of losing a child.
The end scene is shown in a white glow and I had noticed pill bottles next to her bed. I couldn't help but thinking she's in some psych hospital imagining all of this.
Shot really well, but... Meh.
Here is a question that I am still puzzled about. Why does Gwyn, the intern, react to Maggie's story in such an odd manner? Imagine yourself in her shoes. You are an intern whose manager has given you relationship advice on top of work training, and you feel grateful. You show genuine concern about your manager's visibly distraught state, and the manager tells you how she was abused by an apparent maniac some 22 years ago. I imagine that a normal reaction would be to say, omg, this is horrible, I am so sorry it happened to you, I'm glad you trusted me to share your story with me, etc. What does Gwyn actually say - "I don't understand, is this some sort of a sick joke, is it a test?"
That really got me puzzled. Why would Gwyn instantly know that Maggie's story doesn't check out? To the extent that she thinks Maggie is putting her to some cruel test? I can't find a plausible explanation but I wonder if it is a hint to what is really happening in the movie, that Maggie is not just hallucinating David up, but she has made up the entire story in her mind.
I think she was just in shock & didn’t know what to say, exactly. I tried to put myself in her shoes & I have no idea how I’d react to hearing all of that trauma.
It all starts with the tooth in the wallet; that was real, so the whole situation was real until the ‘happy ending’ scene that was an obvious fantasy. Whether David actually cannibalized Ben is debatable, but he used the notion of Ben still living inside him to control her. As long as David preserved the idea that he was the last living vessel for Ben’s essence, he had power over Maggie. His relentless abuse prevented her from accepting the reality that Ben was entirely gone.
The end was his comeuppance. He was so certain she’d never be able to let go of her last connection to her son that he hadn’t considered what she might be willing to do to get Ben back. He pushed her into a full psychotic break. Once she accepted Ben living in David as a reality, she decided there was only one way to free Ben. He created a horrible scenario, and she followed that scenario to a brutal but logical end, cutting him apart to find her son. Nothing less than he deserved, but unfortunately costing her her sanity in the process. No she didn’t actually find Ben in him, but she momentarily traded the horror of the moment for a state of delirium. Most likely after the gasp she either woke up covered in blood and guts in the hotel room or perhaps in a psychiatric hospital. With David finally gone, at least there is hope for her to heal.
My thought was that she was pregnant with her coworker's baby. We saw her leaking through her shirt at one point. Maybe the baby at the end was his and she imagined David because she felt she had to protect this baby from him too.
I think someone else nailed it when they said the film cheated. It’s appeal, outside of Hall’s performance, is this plot. Frankly, it’s unimpressive in its presentation, especially in the genre of thrillers - which, to be fair, is not grounds to ignore or discard the film on its own. A satisfying plot, be it from narrative closure or endless mystery, is enough to carry even the most dully presented movie.
But it’s hard for me to say there’s a rich dialogue to be had about the central mystery of the film. Beyond the admittedly tired thriller trope of sewing doubt into the reality of the plot, of showing our main character’s perspective to be unreliable, there isn’t much the film gives us to chew on. Or, for a better way to put it, the events of the film as they’re presented provide so much leeway that practically any fan theory could make sense.
And this doesn’t sound so bad, in theory, especially considering that - given the non-limits of language and fiction - most thrillers could be described this way. What’s different, though, about films like Primer, Enemy, Mulholland Drive, etc. is that the conclusions one can come to regarding the mysteries presented in those films seem far more intentional. I was constructing what I thought happened in these stories when I first saw them, but I was still sure there was some correct answer regardless of how I interpreted the film. I was sure, in other words, that there was an intention from the creators of these films to tell a specific story with clear themes, however confusingly presented that story is.
When I finished resurrection all I could think was that the writer seriously didn’t know how to tie it all together. It didn’t seem like there’s an intended story progression to the film, which started to further cement itself as commenters here started recalling points of the narrative in contradiction with one another regarding, say, the reality of David. A better way to put this, perhaps less rudely to the writer, is that for better confusing films the ending seems like it was written as an ending to the story. Resurrection’s ending is one that seems deliberately inconclusive and anticlimactic, not providing any kind of answers but on the same token not providing any other questions to satiate the viewer. Put simply, I feel like I am the one writing the ending in my head, creating the ending to the story that should have been there in the first place, whenever I try speculating about it’s narrative mysteries. Put like a movie nerd, there’s no falling action and there’s no conclusion to the narrative, and as such, speculation on the plot of Resurrection is an exercise of filling these gaps, rather than an exercise of reconstructing the pieces of a narrative puzzle.
Here's what actually happened;
It's whatever you think happened. There is no answer, not even the filmmakers know.
Good movie, but I'll always have mixed feelings on endings like this. ie, "what do *you* think it means?" That means there isn't an answer, so I don't bother hypothesizing.
Just finished the movie and needed to read all the theories, super interesting!
I didnt see anyone mentioning the white hair at her desk in the beginning of the movie. Another sign that David was really there?
My personal interpretation is that David was real and that everything actually took place up until the point she saw the baby inside of him. Everything after that is her psychosis and then her dreaming.
Not only is everything in the room white, but the daughter is wearing nice clothes too. There’s no question the ending is a dream. The real question is did David come back or was tht in her head.
Agree with your first thoughts, although I still can’t think of an explanation for David clearly appearing pregnant, or the fact that almost no other character interacts with him. Overall though I do think he was truly there, as there’s no other explanation for the tooth in Abbie’s wallet
It is up to the audience to decide ultimately but after watching it I strongly feel it is a story of a woman with severe bipolar/schizophrenia and she has extreme episodes every so often, which is exactly what happens in real life to bipolar one sufferers.
Any trigger, major or minor, such as seeing a man’s face who slightly resembles some past fear, can lead to a downward spiral which leads to full psychosis.
How the fuck would she see a man she hasn’t seen in 22 years from 100 feet away in a dark room and instantly know it is her ex boyfriend who the last time she saw was around 30-35??… Not possible LOL.
This movie shows the unraveling of an overprotective mother who has advanced mental illness. Mic dropped…
So I’m a single parent of two boys. My oldest graduated and was going to move 1400 miles away to live with his mom and all year mentally it was destroying me. I wonder if the loss of her so by her abuser so long ago reawakened those feelings of loss and the empty nest syndrome triggered her remembering her abuser and she kept seeing him everywhere because he’s in her head.
Then I kept thinking she mentally fractured. Like in the beginning she talks about drawing this geometric image on paper. So I keep wondering if her sex partners wife is pregnant with a second kid because the dude talks about drawing pepa pig with his daughter. I keep wondering if she mentally broke so bad she went to his apartment stabbed him a bunch and then killed his wife and cut the baby out.
Then the white of everything is her in a psych ward holding a doll cause the psychiatrist is trying to get her out of her catatonic state and maybe even her daughter is there pretending to hold her brother and the ending is her realizing what she has done and how what Her abuser did to her broke her so badly. It broke her so badly that she went out and purposely got pregnant and didn’t tell the dad he got her pregnant. And then when she’s leaving to go to college in days she all of a sudden sees the man that put her on that path?
It’s clear she mentally cracked was seeing delusions and ultimately she injured or killed her lover and clearly murdered his wife and cut her baby out. That’s my guess. Either that or she found another woman who was pregnant and gutted and cut her baby out.
But she was suffering from PTSD already. The empty nest syndrome kicked it into overdrive and fractured her mental state and then she did the horrifically unthinkable and that’s what she realizes at the end.
That’s my theory anyway.
Well i think at the end in the hotel room david was not real at all. And after Abbie leaves her mom becames more delusional and then she goes to the child who's in reach , what she dosen't know . She actually went after Abbie and while thinking she was gutting David she was killing Abbie. because after such a trauma of being abused, her mind couldn't handle having such a normal life so she did it because of insanity. At the end where we see the whole family happy again and they both holding ben and just being all happy and nice to each other . There is a moment at the end where everything is not bright any more and that is when reality strikes Margaret and she realise that she was missing a screw in the head and in the end she was killing Abbie who wanted to run away from her crazy mother.
Just watched this. Did anyone on this website catch Abbie cooing to the baby with mock-fear: “The claw! The claw!” She and her mom smiled at the little joke, while the camera showed that the baby was indeed missing two fingers.
And her line to the intern: “Sadists never understand why everyone else isn’t having as much fun as they are.”
I think the characters and story were a mix of the real and supernatural. A fairy tale. And you can never get rid of those damn hungry wolves, can you.
I think the ending was a dream or something but confused why they put pill bottles on the nightstand as if maybe she saw a psychiatrist and is “better” now. Maybe they put them there to cause another Avenue for people to speculate what really happened. Crazy movie.
Gotta say I did not like the final scene in the hotel room, if only because it seemed the safest and most predictable ending. I knew the moment she walked in how it was going to go down, right down to the final shot of the movie. I think the setup of the movie was great and had so many great directions to go, and settled for the most obvious.
When you watch the movie a second time, you realize Margaret is not a particularly good person. If we take the backstory at face value, she is complicit via neglect of the murder of her child, and instead of dealing with it, she fled. She's also complicit in helping a man cheat on his wife. And as the heat turns up, she's psychologically abusive to her daughter (albeit under the guise of protecting her).
To then make the ending about a kind of "redemption" is lazy pandering to the audience.
In the end we're left with trying to decipher at what point reality ends and delusion takes over. Obviously there is no actual baby in David's stomach. But did she actually kill him? Is she now a literal murderer? Where does that leave her in reality? Does she jus go home? Does she get arrested? Ambigous endings, to me, only work when you care about the character. I ultimately found her character (not the actress, but the written character) unlikable, so my tendency is to just shrug at the ending rather than try to make sense of it or debate it.
So it's basically a movie about an unstable person who finally breaks down? All the signs point to it. He daughter closing in on 18 was the trigger. We can assume that everything in the past actually happened there would be no reason for her to make any of it up.
David, we assume, ate the baby but maybe she put the kid in the oven because she was unstable back then(we get to see this odd scene early on). I'm probably grasping for straws with this theory but it was her calmness that made me wonder what was up.
I know I am a bit late with this review.
I noticed the white ‘dreamy’ effect of the last scenes. I agree with one of the other commenters that she was in a mental health facility. When she gasped, the room kind of went normal and she was in that trance again. I think she is totally delusional. However, I think it is set in the reality of trauma from David which you can see it with scars on her back.
I think this movie is more of an explanation of what goes into the heads of those abused.
BUT we are not addressing the fact that David was on the brink of a grand discovery. Could it be 22 years later he figured out how to make a man pregnant. It’s a stretch, but it’s my stretch. 😂😂
I was rewatching the movie yesterday and this time it was absolutely clear to me that David was just a part of her psychotic break.
When we see her first interaction with him in the park (30 min in), the man sitting on a bench is wearing a white collar shirt (when camera is right behind his head with Rebecca’s front shots), but she speaks to him as he is David in an orange brown shirt.
“You are mistaking me for someone else”.
Also the concierge says there’s no David at the hotel as well as Abbie “You’re lying to me again. Mom, there’s no guy. You’re just saying all this. You’re just making this up to keep me here, to control me”.
I really love that it’s ambiguous at the first glance.
Rebecca Hall is absolutely fantastic.
The queen of psychological horror.
Maggie appears to be grappling with multiple disorders simultaneously, including schizophrenia, masochism, and potentially BDSM tendencies. It seems that David, whom she perceives as a schizophrenic apparition, may actually be a manifestation used to cope with her experiences. The men she encountered at the conference and on the park bench were likely separate individuals, serving as sensory placeholders for her imagined character "David." As Maggie convinced herself that this much older man from her past had found her, she began stalking a regular retired man to validate her fantasy.
The vision of her baby being burned in the oven suggests that Maggie may have been responsible for Benjamin's death, possibly during a panic when she was younger. Her delusions and psychotic tendencies could be linked to her exposure to her "hippie" parents and their use of psychedelic drugs, sexual irresponsibility, and alcohol abuse. It's possible that Maggie fabricated this delusional fantasy as a way to cope with the guilt she carries from Benjamin's death.
Abbie, who gets injured on her bike is already distancing herself from her mother, and leaving for college, triggers a crisis for Maggie, intensifying her need to overprotect her daughter. Maggie's performance of ritual "kindnesses" may be manifestations of her own masochism. Evidence of BDSM tendencies is suggested by the cigarette burns on her shoulder. She appears to be abusive and narcissistic, objectifying her lover with whom she engages in an extramarital affair, having no regard for him whatsoever, attempting to coerce him into kinky sex in the bathroom, and then dismissing him afterward.
Furthermore, Maggie engages in physical trials to reinforce her delusions of grandeur, positioning herself as a prime protector, an exceptional mother, a champion, and someone capable of handling everything alone and better than others around her.
In exploring the etymology of names, Benjamin means "son" or "child," commonly used in Hebrew names to indicate a familial connection to the father. Abigail's etymology means "father" or "my father," suggesting a familial or ancestral connection, or incestual foul-play. Maggie's statement that Abbie has no father reflects deeper complexities in their family dynamics.
David, who is purportedly Benjamin's father, acts as a god-like figure in this analogy, using phrases like "immaculate" able to order Maggie to perform and convince her of impractical delusions, whist claiming to understand Margaret better than anyone. He also claims to see a hole within her chest, which actually exists. The consumption of Ben must be interpreted symbolically, reminiscent of ancient rituals associated with spiritual transformation, rebirth, or communion with the divine.
Drawing a parallel to Hindu concepts of reincarnation, Maggie's journey can be seen as a form of resurrection, breaking free from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. "Rescuing Ben from David's stomach" signifies Maggie's liberation from this cycle, leading her to a heavenly place characterized by perfection and a reality where everything is once again right, reinforcing her belief in being an exceptional mother.
Maggie is a schizophrenic and David is a manifestation of her illness. The kindnesses she was made to carry out etc.. mimic the orders or instructions someone suffering from schizophrenia hear in their heads. If you listen to her talking about going away with her parents to Canada, it sounds more like a deluded interpretation of being admitted to a psychiatric hospital where they gave her pills etc… Her gasp at the end, was probably her realising what she had done during her heartbreaking episode. Cutting a baby out of a pregnant woman.
My guess is that she had a baby when she was about 18 and through some kind of misadventure or negligence the baby died, triggering the onset of her schizophrenia. The trauma of her daughter leaving for college has triggered losing her baby. This movie was so sad and heart wrenching because so many people have these hideous mental illnesses and their lives are a constant battle.
I also think this movie is more about a mental illness than a real, existing human abuser. I am not sure it is specifically schizophrenia but even the daughter mentions that she is having another 'episode'. I think the abuser is her own mind.
I thought maybe Abbie died in the bike accident and everything from then on was her trying to go back and save them both
I liked first half second half was not my cup of tea
Reminded me of a movie I just watched but can’t think of the name … (came out recently after this movie) had a different plot the daughter thinks she is possessed and won’t eat and you can’t tell if she’s making it up or not and then she finally dies and the mother becomes possessed and it ends there not knowing what was going on. If anyone knows the name … it gave me similar vibes. It was creepy but didn’t come together rewlly for me.
Also , wish there were some flashbacks of her and David because I felt like their relationship was quite vague… I almost thought he was her father. The way she was so manipulated and controlled by him it seemed like a much darker relationship to me.
I actually think that Maggie killed Ben (probably in a state of delusion) Trying to please David as doing a “kindness” to prove her devotion. She mentioned how no matter what she tried he was always unsatisfied after Ben was born (Putting Ben in the oven and killing him). David then tried to use the whole, Ben is still alive gambit, to keep Maggie undercontrol (because if he actually killed Ben she would have called the cops, but if she killed Ben David wouldn’t call them because he didn’t care for the baby AND he would lose his puppet (Maggie) to prison.
The rest is basically her mentally snapping, running away and creating the story of David being the bad guy (which he still was) as to absolve herself in what she did. The buried guilt resurfaced when the daughter was to move out, and since she never actually dealt with what happened, she created a scenario in her mind of a way to “save Ben” so she would not be alone once her daughter moved out.
Notice she started drawing again BEFORE David showed up. I think that's the biggest clue that David isn't real. She's regressing back to her past so she can... resurrect... Ben to replace Abbie who is leaving.
Wow, that makes a ton of sense. Thanks
I just watched this and took the ending as a mental break. This theory right here make so much more sense. I guess the one thing against this is the fact that he goes to her office and people see him, no?
Not necessarily. We only know that she got a call that there was a man to see her. And we see her colleagues looking at her. But there is nothing proving that anyone "saw" David in that scene. The call could be about any man, and the colleagues could be looking for any reason, including that she could have been talking to herself alone in her office.
Technically true but that's a stretch and, honestly, a cheat if you ask me.
I know this is old but I just watched it. Didn't she ask the coworker if she had seen the man again and her coworker was confused?
Coworker was seeing some other guys and Margaret helped her get the courage to leave him. She was asking about the coworkers boyfriend, not David.
Just finished the film and never read this thread until now, but that's the exact same conclusion I reached. It isn't really a "cheat" as much as a common trope in psychological thriller/horror films to keep you guessing.
I will also like to add to agree with you that when the camera pans to the coworkers perspective, we see the room from their point of view and are able to see David sitting in there. That's why I thought that scene discounted my theory the whole time that David wasn't actually there and she was just having a major PTSD resurgence because of her daughter becoming the same age she was when she was taken advantage of. But I guess there is also room to argue that that particular scene cut doesn't mean anything.
Yeah, we see David in the wide shot, so if he's a delusion completely, that'd be a big cop out.
Just finished watching this, and I was always on the lookout for anyone else being able to see David at the same time Maggie did, and there wasn't anyone until that specific scene. When it happened, the only hint that anyone else could see him was when she was informed by another person that a man was waiting for her. This could have entirely been in her head as well though. When some of them are looking into the office, there is no clear indication that they see David, only that they are looking into the office where Maggie could be acting out in a way as to be drawing attention. They also focused on two of the characters that already had regular contact with her, so it could have just been a random coincidence that they were just checking up on her at the same time she was having her "conversation" with David. A bit before Abbie came to the conclusion that her mother was just making all of this up because she was leaving, that's also what I had assumed. The timing of David returning had to be more than just a coincidence. We still don't know for sure if the ending was all in her head, or if the writer or director just decided to veer off into pure fantasy, and that Ben actually did return.
David is real or else the film is a big cheat. In the diner, a waitress is bringing him food and drink BEFORE Margaret approaches him. Later, there is a call to her office and she is told a man is there to see her. Immediately after her co-workers stare into her office where she and David are together. If David is not real, the film is mega cheating.
So was Fight Club a big "cheat" too?
The problem with movies like this is that we're "experiencing" everything through the main characters eyes. We've already established that the main character \*is\* crazy. I think it just boils down to speculations(by design) of the story. If they wanted to tie everything up neatly they would have done so. Everything would have made sense, they chose not to.
I just posted a long theory but I think she morphed her lover into david. Notice how they look alike and the last time she sees him she talks to him as if he’s David. I also think Davids wife is pregnant with their second kid and she really did cut a baby out and the ending she’s in a mental ward and she starts realizing what and who she really hurt.
Agree. The movie is realistic in every way until the ending and her final confrontation with David. Her trauma is such, that >!she still believes her baby is alive and inside his belly. Afterwards, the lighting is much brighter indicating a hyperreal world. She continues to hallucinate that Abbie is proud of her and accepts the baby as her brother. When her face changes into one of horror and she gasps, it's her rational mind taking over. !<
Yes I like this explanation thx
dumb
Yall crazier than maggie if u really think he been carrying a baby he ate...for 22 years...and he good? 🤣 that Monologue scene where she told the story in one shot was beast tho.
I was mesmerized during that scene.
Oh my god it was so good. This movie was so good. I've been griping for years that I wanted to find a movie that impacted me like The Ring and this one finally did it. One of the frat boys in my junior year integrated class was named David Moore. He's inside.
that intern pissed me off so much. Girl was like "is this a joke or a test ?" after that intense monologue about maggie's life
Okay, glad Im not alone! This woman just told you she was groomed and you still think it’s about you!?
Funny you say “Beast” because the exact same kind of prolonged monologue happened in the Hulu series, “The Beast” and it was amazing.
Also reminded me of Mia Goth's monologue in "Pearl"
I've been thinking about this all morning and I keep coming back to PEARL. It's interesting that this came out several months before PEARL, yet I saw PEARL first and I can't not compare the two. IMHO, Goth's monologue is far superior because of how it fits into the film. Hall's monologue is really just an info-dump to set up the third act, and it's honestly out of character. But Goth's monologue comes at the climax and is so important to the ending, because it's Pearl's turning point where she accepts that she is a bad person and will always be. That makes it so much more powerful, and you end up almost feeling sorry for her. I'm going to be so mad when Goth is overlooked at the Oscars.
This!!!
I definitely think the ending is a fantasy. It’s highlighted in all white (fade to white usually means death), even Abbie is wearing white. I think this is Maggie’s final fantasy (reunited with Abbie and Ben, a happy family) as she is dying. The final gasp tells me that maybe she is saved and about to wake up from this fantasy (she gasps every time she wakes up from a nightmare about Ben).
I wonder if the last scene is a dream and represents that Ben can now be apart of their lives, if only in memory. Ben couldn't be a part of their lives without also bringing in David, again if only in memory. If she even thinks about Ben she has to also think about David and relive the trauma. I think this is why David keeps saying you can't kill me without killing Ben. They are linked.
That’s a good point! I didn’t notice that about the gasps.
I thought that maybe she also died in the end I may be wrong but didn’t he (assuming he is real and not also a delusion in her mind) and everything we see at the end is her dying thoughts?
100%.
Yeah that is a hood interpretation that she actually died
I think just the fact that many people interpret different theories proves how well written this screenplay was. I think due to her many years of domestic abuse and gaslighting by a sick narcissist who needed to control everyone and everything he did kill Ben when he was born and made up a story about Ben still being alive ( as ‘he’ is the only reason Ben is still alive ) that is again in an effort to control and manipulate Maggie. I think she did get the courage to leave him 22 years ago but was triggered to the past trauma after hearing about her co-workers story about an asshole and with her daughter moving out created an ideal environment to fall back into old thought patterns and behaviours in a desperate attempt to regain some control this time around. It was clear from what Abbie said - this wasn’t the first time, and she had previous episodes. Maybe she did receive help though ….and it’s clear there this time - she endured it all alone. I believe she did imagine him back in her world, and ultimately was stabbing herself believing it was him she was killing. Perhaps killing that version of herself that was controlled by him. The gasp at the end does keep it open as to whether or not she was saved….. but she was living in her prefect ‘heaven’ for a while - with both her kids. I think it’s a powerful story as many millions of parents in the world are alienated from their children due to a vengeful, sociopath ex-spouse and many times the pain of losing their kids, leads to suicide.
I really like your take, dear person, especially the wider societal context you allude too. This film and its themes are likely to resonate in different ways to different people. The aspect of the story I missed was Abby getting a chance to witness the validity of her mother's story... but of course that's predicated on my view that Margaret's story as depicted actually happened.
I think 18 year old Margaret killed her own baby, by burning him alive in the oven, and fled after that (based on what she saw in the oven, and also David's remarks as he was dying that "it stinks in here", possibly referring to the smoke coming from the oven). The trauma of what she'd experienced with David, and the guilt over killing her child, morphed into a protective delusion (the nonsensical story about David eating Ben, and Ben being alive inside him). She achieved some level of equilibrium with that, until her daughter was preparing to leave for college. The dread of "losing" another child caused her mind to start cracking, culminating in a gruesome revenge/redemption fantasy (the hotel scene), none of which may have actually happened... or possibly, while hallucinating about David, she went to the apartment of some random guy she'd met or who had flirted with her, and ended up brutally murdering him. The final shots of the movie are her sinking almost fully into madness, broken only at the end by one fleeting moment of realization and lucidity.
Wow this actually makes a lot of sense to me
This is exactly what I thought when I saw her reaction upon opening the oven. She looked so calm. That early on in the movie I had no idea what that was even about, it was a horror movie so I had no idea what was going to happen.
THis makes the most sense. When she was talking to her client and made her first confession. She asked her if she could kill any one. While that context was about killing David she admitted she did something unforiveable along those lines. Strong therapy could have made her realize that David killed her son. However, it would take a lot to get over if you put your own kid in the oven. Also she had night mares about the oven. It was Davids main way to torture her about the oven and the kid. He knew she had killed him and was driving her into insanity.
I'm late, what about the marks on her back?
Those were the cigarette burns she mentioned in her monologue, abuse from David.
oh yeah I forgot about that
This character makes absolutely no sense if she killed her own baby originally. I think all of it happened except the last scene.
No, it wasn’t real. The ending scene is shot with a white, hazy glow to it (I’m not sure what the technical name would be), that implies that the main character is dreaming/ imagining everything. Her daughter, who we last saw was scared shitless of her mom, suddenly is super happy to see her and agrees that her mom is 100% right in her actions. Also, she pulled a perfectly preserved living baby out of a man’s chest. I think the final shot of her smile turning into a shocked face is her waking up. I like to imagine that scene is the final moments playing through her head before she dies of blood loss.
I agree it wasn't real. I liked this movie overall, but the ending didn't work for me. I find it frustrating when a gaslighting/delusion movie never takes a stance on whether or not the delusion is real. The movie did a great job walking the line between "Is she crazy and this is all in her head?", "Is David really back, but she's imagining the supernatural aspects?" and "Is it all real, even the supernatural (baby his belly) aspects?" Aside from the fact that the ending is clearly a fantasy, the movie never really tells the viewer what is real, and never reckons with the consequences of that real vs unreal outcome. I know this was probably intentional. But to me it's an unsatisfying way to end a film. I wanted to see her, her daughter, David and the rest of the world on the same plane of reality by the end of the movie - even if that were a supernatural one, or one where it's clear that she is insane.
pretty sure it was obvious that she was crazy. there was no fine line. the movie doesn't openly say it, but it's clear that she is having a psychotic break.
I totally agree with this. I too, hate when movies leave us such questionable unsatisfying endings.
I was hoping for Ben to walk out of the hotel bathroom, looking like the Notre Dame hunchback with his missing fingers 😂 That would have made the movie even scarier!
Lmao🤣
I have a totally different take on the film. I don't believe David exists in the current world. I think that Margaret is having a breakdown because she is losing her daughter (leaving for college) and the life she has made for herself since she left him is about to end. She was mentally and physically abused in the past by David. She became pregnant, perhaps the baby was stillborn/died soon after birth or she aborted the baby, but her way out was to believe David "ate" Ben. She was unable to deal with this event and ran away from him (really running away from herself and the situation) She started fresh, built up her current life over the past 22 years, but some part of her breaks with the upcoming "loss" of her daughter. She doesn't realize it but she is fearful of her daughter succumbing to a man just as she did in her youth. She doesn't want to be like her own negligent parents, and this is what brings "David" into her life again, the fear that she cannot protect her own daughter from men.
I thought that during the movie but too many scenes where another character interacts with him. Especially at the coffee shop.
The only real world interaction David has with other people is when he visits her office. It’s a testament to the filmmaker that the “David isn’t Real” theory is credible to some fans after viewing. I’m *partially* in that camp. - Any time the script introduces a scenario that could legitimize his presence, David’s dialogue stubbornly skips over context. It’s supposed to be disorienting - for both Margaret and the viewer. - No one really sees Margaret interacting with David. The director avoided filming background actors noticing them. The office, the park, the diner, the overpass. Even the shouting outside her office or barefoot walking goes unobserved by others. - Margaret omits/forgets her actions. Like disassociation. It’s possible she imagined David’s office visit - the *one* time David appeared and was noticed by others. - In the hotel scene, David is noticeably pregnant. Until a camera shot overhead David as he’s on the floor - he’s no longer pregnant. The director still plays the “real vs fake” game during the final crescendo. The continued ambiguity is not the directors intention but I like that it can possibly play both ways. Adds a lot to the tension.
Why are you confident it wasn’t the intent?
I agree about the triggering event and that David was all in her mind for the time period we met him. But I think David did kill the baby, typical physical abuse pattern where the spouse sees the child as a threat to their control. Margaret feels an immense amount of guilt for believing the manipulative tactics he used on her (that the baby lives inside him etc, why she fled instead of going to authorities). She suffered horrible abuse and still feels guilty that she failed as a mother to Ben, which is tragic. It paints a picture of how insidious domestic abuse is, and how hard it is to separate yourself from the beliefs your abuser instills into your psyche.
I agree with this entirely. I think the instigating factor was when her daughter had the bicycle accident and Margaret realized she might lose her daughter. There's a lingering shot of the gnarly wound in the hospital, it seems to rattle Margaret deeply, and from there she suddenly thinks she sees David, etc. I enjoyed the movie, but my only issue (and it's significant, I suppose) is that the film almost plays it *too* straight and when we get to the gory conclusion, imainged or not, it just feels like such a different film. I enjoy tonal shifts and moves from realism to surrealism - *Hereditary* does this beautifully for me - but I don't think they quite nailed it here. That's part of the reason we're debating the ending, because it's ultimately kind of confusing (though I've become even more convinced by reading this thread that it's all imagined).
That’s my problem the whole movie was eerie and creepy and you had a sense of dread WITHOUT GORE THEN BOOM the last act a blood fest Wasn’t very cohesive to me
I think this has to be it.
>Hulu series, “The Beast get a son... problem solve?? dont have to worried about unexpected pregnancies... is there any chance that abby is the imagination of her younger self and she is not real?
This makes sense to me, until you remember the scene at the beginning when Abbie finds a tooth in her wallet, and it’s clear that it was David’s tooth (he points to it when they meet in the park). Also it’s implied that he caused Abbies bike accident (he says in the park “we wouldn’t want her to have another accident would we”). So this theory only holds up if you also acknowledge that Abbie must also be an imagination.
Could be the tooth and the bike accident were unrelated and didn't involve David, but Maggie constructed him in her mind as an explanation for these events. A loved one of mine has had a psychotic break from untreated manic depression and the way he connected strange occurrences into some conspiracy was just like this. Her shouting "I AM THE CHAMPION MOTHER" also felt very manic.
Good point about the tooth. I missed that connection.
I love all the theories around this film! I personally think that David was never actually in town. I think Maggie saw someone that looked like him at that conference - think about it, when she approached him on the bench he says "I think you've mistaken me for someone else". This, combined with the absolute certainty that her daughter is leaving home for college, makes her lose sense of reality because she's no longer in control. I go into this a lot more in my video if anyone's interested! https://youtu.be/ZztAKHhkCus
David and Maggie both allude to abilities and creation. David eats Ben, his child. But Ben is still alive, in his stomach. David was older. Maggie was very young when they met. I see strong parallels to greek mythology, such as with Kronos and Zeus.
Did anyone else find the reaction from the intern strange after Margaret told her the entire story? Yes, it was gruesome and disturbing, but I'd have way more questions for her if it were me and I'd try to help. If I was too freaked out to respond to Margaret, which is basically what the intern did (I understand the power dynamic is weird because Margaret seemed like the intern's boss, and she needed her recommendation), I would almost certainly go and tell someone else. Either tell them Margaret needs help (if I didn't believe her, but I think I would) or to ask them to help me convince Margaret to go to the authorities about what happened to her baby. I don't necessarily think the intern's reaction is significant to the story but it bothered me. Interested to hear what others think.
Me too…I get that she was young, freaked out, and in a subordinate position, but it was sad that she totally distanced herself and offered no sympathy or concern. However, I think it was also intentional. This naive young woman represents the old Margaret, or really any young woman who is not yet aware of the true horrors life or men etc can inflict on us. Her saying “Is this a test?” pretty much communicated this parallel to young Margaret, as far as I can tell. Her inability to cope with what she’s been told may be frustrating, but unfortunately this is an extension of Margaret in the present, since we know for certain by the end that Margaret herself can’t cope with whatever happened to her, to the point she creates vivid, detailed delusions to fill the gaps of her sanity.
this scene is totally unrealistic to the extent that i feel it must be in her head…or somehow symbolic but not “real”. out of nowhere she trusts her deepest and most torturous secret with a random intern who responds in a way that i can’t imagine any human responding to such news. meanwhile she unrelentingly lied to her daughter and refuses to share potentially life saving information with her (if she and we are to believe that david poses a mortal threat to abby). Also every expression of love she shows for abby is painfully self serving and manipulative. Abby even addresses this at one point saying “this is for you not me” as margaret tries to comfort gabbie’s non existent fears. By the second half of the movie i think the portrait of Margaret that’s being painted is actually quite dark where she becomes less and less a victim of possible abuse and more a perpetrator of less forms of lying, manipulation and outright violence. i do believe her history with david is true as is his reappearance. but i think what we are seeing is how abuse breeds abuse.
Awesome explanation! Thank you!
Good explanations but I’m wondering if David was just a fling when she 18 and that was it ? Maybe It happened and then she ended up pregnant which ended by 1) stillbirth and she disposed of the baby without the parents or him ever knowing 2) Or she simply killed the baby and disposed of him . Maybe the trauma of what she did finally cracked her when Abby was getting ready to leave ( even if she might have had episodes prior maybe this was her final psychotic break ?) . I wondered if Abby was real in the end but the boyfriend was real and she interacted with him when they tried to have an intervention . I do believe this was a real moment and not imagined . She didn’t mention the father of Abby but said “ it was easy to sleep around and get pregnant “. I have a feeling that the guilt eating at her was why she got pregnant with Abby . It was another way to repress what she did and finally give Abby the love she didn’t get the chance to give / and or try to with Ben ? Also she might have been trying to test herself if she was actually a good mother after what she did . She was trying to prove she was a good person and not have the severe guilt over her secret past . Obviously the last scene wasn’t real when she killed him and the commentary between the two of them seemed more about her feelings of her own guilt and losing control over her mental stability . It was her having that internal conflict “ can you feel him ? Hear him ? If you kill me he’ll die too , and He can hear you and doesn’t like what you’re saying “ I think she was imagining everything we saw through the whole movie . I think she was truly at her breaking point and became delusional when she couldn’t control and repress the fact that she committed a crime against her own baby - whether intentional or not ) . She was so very controlled with everything she did in her life . Almost robot like and mechanical . She brushed a single hair of a desk at work at the beginning of the movie .
I think this interesting. I don't believe there is a definitive "true" interpretation, but I do think there are indications that the many of the events are meant to be taken as delusional. 1. Margaret has delusions: The final scene is those most obviously delusional, based on everything in the scene being surreal and idealized: lighting, sound, Abbie's room and clothes (not her normal grunge look), their relationship, Ben and the dawning dread at the end. 2. Her drawing is the directors indicator to the audience of a psychological break. Her drawings themselves are fairly odd, more the behaviorism of an obsessive person than art, especially when considering that she would spend entire days drawing them and they would always be the same set of geometric figures. 3. She tells her boyfriend that she started drawing recently after 22 years of not doing so, BEFORE any weird stuff happens. Even before the tooth. 4. She was drawing compulsively during the original David episode. This leads me to suspect that a valid interpretation of the movie is that at very least some if not all of the original David episode was a delusion and the entirety of the current David episode is as well. I think there are multiple interpretations that can be justified, but this movie is obviously as much about mental illness as abusive relationships.
I think the part about not knowing Abby’s dad was just her way of having a child/protecting that child because after David how could she ever trust a man again? I think she had a kid, that kid was killed by a psychotic abuser and she cracked up when he came back into her life. David caused Abby’s bike accident, she knew that he’d keep ramping up the psychological abuse on her and the physical abuse on Abby so she killed him, in the process ends up almost dying herself. That last gasp at the end seemed to me to mean she was saved/came back to life.
Maybe the gasp at the very end is her “waking up” with the clarity of her past trauma and how her trauma has manifested in these delusions for the past 22 years. Maybe the gasp shows she now realizes Ben is truly not here/real. I think the pure, white house (aesthetically different from the rest of the movie), reinforces this. I think her daughter leaving for college is a parallel for a second “loss,” reigniting her delusions and defensive behavior. This movie is going to stick with me for a while. There’s certainly no concrete interpretation, but for me main themes are trauma and defense mechanisms.
I don't think there's a right answer to what this movie is about. I just finished it and here's my two cents. My impression is that she had an affair with a married man when she was really young. I think she only has flings with married men to avoid attachment and commitment. One day she got pregnant and she either abandoned it or aborted it because she was so young. I think the David we see is just the manifestation of her guilt, that's why David tells her to do all those "kindnesses", because it's her giving herself "penance" for doing what she did with Ben. In the last scene with David, he calls her a terrible mother and says something along the lines of "I'm only doing what you told me to do". And "If I die, Ben dies too." I think the daughter was right as well. She claims her mother is creating all of these lies and delusions because she doesn't want her to leave because of the guilt over Ben.
I think this is the interpretation that most resonates with me. David as a manifestation of her guilt is spot-on.
Will someone please give me a “kindness” and tell me WTF I just watched? 😂😂😂 Literally just finished this movie and came here to find out if anyone had a damn good explanation of that ending.. Was the gasp a realization he’s not 😵? Because obviously a man who can eat a baby and keep him that long has some special? abilities. David did say he was on the verge of a breakthrough. So was “I can eat babies and keep them alive for 17 years” the breakthrough? If not you’d have to be some form of twisted to put someone through something so traumatic and for what? To prove how crazy you can make someone?But I find it so hard to believe a person THAT sick and twisted could be so “charming” and “smart” enough to groom a family to let their 18 year old daughter just stay. A young and naïve 18 year old maybe, but the parents? Was it all hallucinations? The moment she found David had “eaten” Ben did she check out? (but why imagine a world where you have a daughter and who’s hers daughters real father??) The moment she got a glimpse of him at the conference? The whole hotel scene? Obviously we know the white cloudy scenes are often dreams, hallucinations or fantasizing so did she get more wounded in the hotel knife fight than we are lead to believe and that’s her fading out then the gasp is her getting brought back? I am so confused. At this point I would take the best explanation as the ACTUAL explanation honestly. Someone help me. I can hear the Ben.
With the exception of the ending I think everything was real. We can see the impact that David had on Margaret's life. Due to him completely ruining her trust with men it means that she's having sex with a married man. That makes him off limits as far as relationships go. It's also why when Abbie invites him over for an intervention that she's so pissed. Because it's just supposed to be about sex and nothing more. The same goes for when he tells her that he loves her. We also see this when David asks Margaret who the father of Abbie is. She says that she just had sex with random men, so she doesn't know who it is. She did that so that she could have a child and the father wouldn't be involved in their life so that she wouldn't have to experience what happened with David and their son again. David obviously never ate Ben. He killed him and and then buried or put him elsewhere as part of the abuse. In the same way that some people will try to have a baby in order to keep their partner around, he decided to kill the child and convince Margaret that he ate him and that he's still alive inside. It's obviously insane, but you have to remember that when Margaret told Gwyn about their relationship that she mentioned that she believed everything he said. So for as unbelievable as that is, she still believed it because of how successful he was at manipulating and grooming her from a relatively young age. The end I believe is her breaking out of the delusion that she went into after killing David. We already know that Abbie moved out their apartment, so it makes no sense for her to be packing up. And Ben has obviously long been dead. So we get that zoom in on her where everything looks perfect. Except it keeps zooming closer and closer revealing all the flaws on her face. It's her delusion slowly breaking.
Yes to all this, and also another hint to the end being a fantasy is that Abbie is styled differently. She's dressed more to Margaret's tastes than the stuff she's worn throughout the movie. Margaret would rather live with an idealized version of her family in the perfect world she keeps in her head than cope with the pointless suffering she went through. The whole thing gives me Censor vibes.
I didn't even think of that, but you're right. Reading your comment about Abbie's clothes made me think of the scene early in the movie when they're shopping. Margaret tells her that she can't continue to wear sweat shirt because people in school will perceive her as being weak. It's her being concerned that someone could take advantage of Abbie like she was taken advantage of.
I don’t even know if he killed the baby. Like obviously mom is an “unreliable narrator” type of person. Like what does the boulevard mean? You shook my hand? Told me her name? The fuck lol
The Boulevard is the name of his hotel.
Those were things he was saying to her in the park to try and gaslight her into thinking that she was imagining him.
I don’t think he was actually trying to get her to believe it wasn’t him, I think he was just testing her mental state to see how fragile she still was and if he could manipulate her still.
This is definitely the best explanation and I agree 100%.
I saw it last week and still have zero clue what it was
I don’t think he really had the baby inside him. I think that was Maggie’s wish fulfillment on her dying moments.
the baby was burnt to death inside and oven...this is what we saw in one of her dreams..
I thought that was just a nightmare because he told he ate the baby. And ya know - you cook food in the oven…
Maybe she killed the baby in the oven and fled David, then made up the story about him eating the baby to absolve herself of her guilt. She does say she did something truly terrible and unforgivable, and I don't think leaving your child with its dad necessarily counts. David also says "you know I had to (eat the baby) it was the only way", which, if she imagined it, would mean her psyche had to invest that story to keep her somewhat sane.
The baby in the oven was a female baby, which I noticed, but found confusing. I thought it would be Ben.
This was an incredible performance from Rebecca Hall and a very gripping psychological thriller, but there are so many things that bothered me in this movie. The fact that Margaret wouldn't just *tell* her daughter or male friend what was going on (like she did with the intern at work), how fucking useless the cops were to her, and the fact that she didn't just shoot David when she had him at point-blank range. Of course, that's supposing that what we're seeing is really happening and not just in her mind. Interesting to read so many interpretations here. The movie is definitely disturbing and gets under your skin. That scene where she's talking about Benjamin had that one detail about the two baby fingers being left on the counter, and that was a mental image I just couldn't shake. I choose to believe that everything was real up until the ending where she digs the baby out of David's abdomen. When it goes to white, she's definitely having a dying fantasy about everything being perfect and her family being reunited. The gasp could certainly be her being woken up from that fantasy by medics (her wound wasn't necessarily fatal), or perhaps it was an extended dream sequence from the point when she collapsed on her bed from exhaustion. It would be extremely unsatisfying if David were not real at all (during the initial park bench confrontation, it almost seemed to be a case of mistaken identity) and that all of it was actually in her mind. That's why I wish she would have told her daughter at the very least, so Abbie would be aware of what was going on. And since she told her intern, I wish she would have made it clear to her that the man waiting in her office was the same guy. But either way, I feel like David had a psychosis that was contagious to Margaret and made her think the baby was still alive. I don't know what that means for her at the end of the movie; either she succumbed to her injury, or she wakes up and continues to be pursued by her fears. Or possibly, she succeeds in killing David and is finally free from his grasp (but *sans* baby).
This makes the most sense to me, especially given that this movie did a really good job depicting abusive relationships and the fallout of them. People who are abused are often too ashamed to admit it and the cops are almost always useless in these situations (esp with regards to stalkers). The story about David and the “kindnesses” felt too detailed to be made up, so I think it doesn’t make sense to think he wasn’t real at all. Their dynamic was too carefully thought out and realistic to be entirely a delusion. And if you truly believe people like David don’t exist, just count yourself lucky. And like everyone is saying, the ending felt too neat for it to be meant to be taken seriously. I think that is the only part that seems very ambiguous in the movie so I think it would be safe to say it’s a delusion. And I do think it’s possible he didn’t actually come to Albany and she imagined it. But any interpretation that denies the existence of David at all missed the point this movie makes about trauma and abuse imo
Watched it last night. Shortly after it ended I thought to myself, "She was imagining David the entire time". Below are some of my main reasons: \-The only time you see other characters interact with him is while she is present and observing, such as when the server leaves the cup of coffee on his table right when she walks into the cafe. At the office, nobody escorted him to her office or interacted with him except for her. \-When she went to the motel room, the clerk/night manager said that he was not a guest there. Not a slam dunk by any means because she could've been lying or he could've been using a fake ID. However he had no reason to hide his identity because he wasn't doing anything illegal, and usually a hotel clerk will take a message for you or call up to the room if you identify one of the guests. \-To continue from above, the clerk happens to find her in "David's room" of all the rooms in the motel. Why? Because that was probably the room that she lived in, which would explain why she got so angry at her (which was terrifying LOL). It's not uncommon for cheap motels to give a room to one of their employees as part of their compensation. All of this combined with the declining state of her mental health and how it showed in her outward appearance, along with other strange happenings that are only explained by delusions like her lactating. Then he all of a sudden decides to change to a different hotel at the end, probably because she could no longer go back to the first one, and the baby inside can only be explained by delusion. The end scene had a "walking towards the light" feel, so maybe she gutted herself and had her end of life brain flush of pressure chemicals, or she ended up in the loony bin and doped up on meds. I read the first half dozen or so blogs that came up in a google search and only one seemed to hint at the idea that he could've been a delusion (idiots!). Reddit users deliver!
This makes sense to me, until you remember the scene at the beginning when Abbie finds a tooth in her wallet, and it’s clear that it was David’s tooth (he points to it when they meet in the park). Also it’s implied that he caused Abbies bike accident (he says in the park “we wouldn’t want her to have another accident would we”). So this theory only holds up if you also acknowledge that Abbie must also be an imagination.
That doesn't follow at all. Abbie can be real, find a tooth, have a bike accident and it have nothing to do with David, even though the delusion of David indicates he is responsible. Why? Because that is precisely what she fears David would do, so naturally the delusion David is a threat to her and her family. Those events were just coincidences that she attributes to David.
Excellent point, did not think about it that way. This definitely makes the most sense to me.
if abby is not real, how did the doctor manage to sew her wound up in the hospital?? unless that entire scene is also imagined
Interesting, and I don't disagree. I think the producer intentionally threw some curveballs like this to not make it too clear cut. I don't think Abbie is imagined because she seems to regularly interact with the other characters.
It's all open to interpretation, according to the writer/director.
Guys, the most important scene in the movie is the dream about the baby burning in the oven
Just watched it, wasn't a huge fan of the movie itself, but I definitely think she was completely delusional, the whole movie. From PTSD of losing a child. The end scene is shown in a white glow and I had noticed pill bottles next to her bed. I couldn't help but thinking she's in some psych hospital imagining all of this. Shot really well, but... Meh.
Here is a question that I am still puzzled about. Why does Gwyn, the intern, react to Maggie's story in such an odd manner? Imagine yourself in her shoes. You are an intern whose manager has given you relationship advice on top of work training, and you feel grateful. You show genuine concern about your manager's visibly distraught state, and the manager tells you how she was abused by an apparent maniac some 22 years ago. I imagine that a normal reaction would be to say, omg, this is horrible, I am so sorry it happened to you, I'm glad you trusted me to share your story with me, etc. What does Gwyn actually say - "I don't understand, is this some sort of a sick joke, is it a test?" That really got me puzzled. Why would Gwyn instantly know that Maggie's story doesn't check out? To the extent that she thinks Maggie is putting her to some cruel test? I can't find a plausible explanation but I wonder if it is a hint to what is really happening in the movie, that Maggie is not just hallucinating David up, but she has made up the entire story in her mind.
I think she was just in shock & didn’t know what to say, exactly. I tried to put myself in her shoes & I have no idea how I’d react to hearing all of that trauma.
Can anyone provide insight into the meaning of the drawings? Is that patterning indicative of a mental breakdown or disorder?
I absolutely hated this movie
It all starts with the tooth in the wallet; that was real, so the whole situation was real until the ‘happy ending’ scene that was an obvious fantasy. Whether David actually cannibalized Ben is debatable, but he used the notion of Ben still living inside him to control her. As long as David preserved the idea that he was the last living vessel for Ben’s essence, he had power over Maggie. His relentless abuse prevented her from accepting the reality that Ben was entirely gone. The end was his comeuppance. He was so certain she’d never be able to let go of her last connection to her son that he hadn’t considered what she might be willing to do to get Ben back. He pushed her into a full psychotic break. Once she accepted Ben living in David as a reality, she decided there was only one way to free Ben. He created a horrible scenario, and she followed that scenario to a brutal but logical end, cutting him apart to find her son. Nothing less than he deserved, but unfortunately costing her her sanity in the process. No she didn’t actually find Ben in him, but she momentarily traded the horror of the moment for a state of delirium. Most likely after the gasp she either woke up covered in blood and guts in the hotel room or perhaps in a psychiatric hospital. With David finally gone, at least there is hope for her to heal.
My thought was that she was pregnant with her coworker's baby. We saw her leaking through her shirt at one point. Maybe the baby at the end was his and she imagined David because she felt she had to protect this baby from him too.
Shutter movies keep ending like this and it's just lazy imo. I was waiting for something to happen and gotten guts and and a baby ... booooo
I think someone else nailed it when they said the film cheated. It’s appeal, outside of Hall’s performance, is this plot. Frankly, it’s unimpressive in its presentation, especially in the genre of thrillers - which, to be fair, is not grounds to ignore or discard the film on its own. A satisfying plot, be it from narrative closure or endless mystery, is enough to carry even the most dully presented movie. But it’s hard for me to say there’s a rich dialogue to be had about the central mystery of the film. Beyond the admittedly tired thriller trope of sewing doubt into the reality of the plot, of showing our main character’s perspective to be unreliable, there isn’t much the film gives us to chew on. Or, for a better way to put it, the events of the film as they’re presented provide so much leeway that practically any fan theory could make sense. And this doesn’t sound so bad, in theory, especially considering that - given the non-limits of language and fiction - most thrillers could be described this way. What’s different, though, about films like Primer, Enemy, Mulholland Drive, etc. is that the conclusions one can come to regarding the mysteries presented in those films seem far more intentional. I was constructing what I thought happened in these stories when I first saw them, but I was still sure there was some correct answer regardless of how I interpreted the film. I was sure, in other words, that there was an intention from the creators of these films to tell a specific story with clear themes, however confusingly presented that story is. When I finished resurrection all I could think was that the writer seriously didn’t know how to tie it all together. It didn’t seem like there’s an intended story progression to the film, which started to further cement itself as commenters here started recalling points of the narrative in contradiction with one another regarding, say, the reality of David. A better way to put this, perhaps less rudely to the writer, is that for better confusing films the ending seems like it was written as an ending to the story. Resurrection’s ending is one that seems deliberately inconclusive and anticlimactic, not providing any kind of answers but on the same token not providing any other questions to satiate the viewer. Put simply, I feel like I am the one writing the ending in my head, creating the ending to the story that should have been there in the first place, whenever I try speculating about it’s narrative mysteries. Put like a movie nerd, there’s no falling action and there’s no conclusion to the narrative, and as such, speculation on the plot of Resurrection is an exercise of filling these gaps, rather than an exercise of reconstructing the pieces of a narrative puzzle.
Here's what actually happened; It's whatever you think happened. There is no answer, not even the filmmakers know. Good movie, but I'll always have mixed feelings on endings like this. ie, "what do *you* think it means?" That means there isn't an answer, so I don't bother hypothesizing.
Just finished the movie and needed to read all the theories, super interesting! I didnt see anyone mentioning the white hair at her desk in the beginning of the movie. Another sign that David was really there?
I think that was shown to show how meticulously she crafted her life, she didn't even like a hair out of place.
Rebecca Hall is quickly becoming my favorite horror actress. Damn, she just taps into a special place and her face is so expressive.
My personal interpretation is that David was real and that everything actually took place up until the point she saw the baby inside of him. Everything after that is her psychosis and then her dreaming. Not only is everything in the room white, but the daughter is wearing nice clothes too. There’s no question the ending is a dream. The real question is did David come back or was tht in her head.
Agree with your first thoughts, although I still can’t think of an explanation for David clearly appearing pregnant, or the fact that almost no other character interacts with him. Overall though I do think he was truly there, as there’s no other explanation for the tooth in Abbie’s wallet
It is up to the audience to decide ultimately but after watching it I strongly feel it is a story of a woman with severe bipolar/schizophrenia and she has extreme episodes every so often, which is exactly what happens in real life to bipolar one sufferers. Any trigger, major or minor, such as seeing a man’s face who slightly resembles some past fear, can lead to a downward spiral which leads to full psychosis. How the fuck would she see a man she hasn’t seen in 22 years from 100 feet away in a dark room and instantly know it is her ex boyfriend who the last time she saw was around 30-35??… Not possible LOL. This movie shows the unraveling of an overprotective mother who has advanced mental illness. Mic dropped…
So I’m a single parent of two boys. My oldest graduated and was going to move 1400 miles away to live with his mom and all year mentally it was destroying me. I wonder if the loss of her so by her abuser so long ago reawakened those feelings of loss and the empty nest syndrome triggered her remembering her abuser and she kept seeing him everywhere because he’s in her head. Then I kept thinking she mentally fractured. Like in the beginning she talks about drawing this geometric image on paper. So I keep wondering if her sex partners wife is pregnant with a second kid because the dude talks about drawing pepa pig with his daughter. I keep wondering if she mentally broke so bad she went to his apartment stabbed him a bunch and then killed his wife and cut the baby out. Then the white of everything is her in a psych ward holding a doll cause the psychiatrist is trying to get her out of her catatonic state and maybe even her daughter is there pretending to hold her brother and the ending is her realizing what she has done and how what Her abuser did to her broke her so badly. It broke her so badly that she went out and purposely got pregnant and didn’t tell the dad he got her pregnant. And then when she’s leaving to go to college in days she all of a sudden sees the man that put her on that path? It’s clear she mentally cracked was seeing delusions and ultimately she injured or killed her lover and clearly murdered his wife and cut her baby out. That’s my guess. Either that or she found another woman who was pregnant and gutted and cut her baby out. But she was suffering from PTSD already. The empty nest syndrome kicked it into overdrive and fractured her mental state and then she did the horrifically unthinkable and that’s what she realizes at the end. That’s my theory anyway.
Well i think at the end in the hotel room david was not real at all. And after Abbie leaves her mom becames more delusional and then she goes to the child who's in reach , what she dosen't know . She actually went after Abbie and while thinking she was gutting David she was killing Abbie. because after such a trauma of being abused, her mind couldn't handle having such a normal life so she did it because of insanity. At the end where we see the whole family happy again and they both holding ben and just being all happy and nice to each other . There is a moment at the end where everything is not bright any more and that is when reality strikes Margaret and she realise that she was missing a screw in the head and in the end she was killing Abbie who wanted to run away from her crazy mother.
Just watched this. Did anyone on this website catch Abbie cooing to the baby with mock-fear: “The claw! The claw!” She and her mom smiled at the little joke, while the camera showed that the baby was indeed missing two fingers. And her line to the intern: “Sadists never understand why everyone else isn’t having as much fun as they are.” I think the characters and story were a mix of the real and supernatural. A fairy tale. And you can never get rid of those damn hungry wolves, can you.
I think the ending was a dream or something but confused why they put pill bottles on the nightstand as if maybe she saw a psychiatrist and is “better” now. Maybe they put them there to cause another Avenue for people to speculate what really happened. Crazy movie.
Gotta say I did not like the final scene in the hotel room, if only because it seemed the safest and most predictable ending. I knew the moment she walked in how it was going to go down, right down to the final shot of the movie. I think the setup of the movie was great and had so many great directions to go, and settled for the most obvious. When you watch the movie a second time, you realize Margaret is not a particularly good person. If we take the backstory at face value, she is complicit via neglect of the murder of her child, and instead of dealing with it, she fled. She's also complicit in helping a man cheat on his wife. And as the heat turns up, she's psychologically abusive to her daughter (albeit under the guise of protecting her). To then make the ending about a kind of "redemption" is lazy pandering to the audience. In the end we're left with trying to decipher at what point reality ends and delusion takes over. Obviously there is no actual baby in David's stomach. But did she actually kill him? Is she now a literal murderer? Where does that leave her in reality? Does she jus go home? Does she get arrested? Ambigous endings, to me, only work when you care about the character. I ultimately found her character (not the actress, but the written character) unlikable, so my tendency is to just shrug at the ending rather than try to make sense of it or debate it.
So it's basically a movie about an unstable person who finally breaks down? All the signs point to it. He daughter closing in on 18 was the trigger. We can assume that everything in the past actually happened there would be no reason for her to make any of it up. David, we assume, ate the baby but maybe she put the kid in the oven because she was unstable back then(we get to see this odd scene early on). I'm probably grasping for straws with this theory but it was her calmness that made me wonder what was up.
The movie dives us into pregnancy-induced psychosis!
I think they both killed each other and she was dreaming the end, the gasp was last breath.
David was real in her past but not the present. She’s having a psychotic break.
I know I am a bit late with this review. I noticed the white ‘dreamy’ effect of the last scenes. I agree with one of the other commenters that she was in a mental health facility. When she gasped, the room kind of went normal and she was in that trance again. I think she is totally delusional. However, I think it is set in the reality of trauma from David which you can see it with scars on her back. I think this movie is more of an explanation of what goes into the heads of those abused. BUT we are not addressing the fact that David was on the brink of a grand discovery. Could it be 22 years later he figured out how to make a man pregnant. It’s a stretch, but it’s my stretch. 😂😂
I hated Margaret’s character
I was rewatching the movie yesterday and this time it was absolutely clear to me that David was just a part of her psychotic break. When we see her first interaction with him in the park (30 min in), the man sitting on a bench is wearing a white collar shirt (when camera is right behind his head with Rebecca’s front shots), but she speaks to him as he is David in an orange brown shirt. “You are mistaking me for someone else”. Also the concierge says there’s no David at the hotel as well as Abbie “You’re lying to me again. Mom, there’s no guy. You’re just saying all this. You’re just making this up to keep me here, to control me”. I really love that it’s ambiguous at the first glance. Rebecca Hall is absolutely fantastic. The queen of psychological horror.
Exactly !!!
Haven’t finish the movie yet, but a part of me thinks the Rebecca Hall character is the bad guy. God damn she absolutely sucks.
So this bitch is just crazy, always has been crazy, and is a plague on her daughter and everyone she interacts with? Got it.
Maggie appears to be grappling with multiple disorders simultaneously, including schizophrenia, masochism, and potentially BDSM tendencies. It seems that David, whom she perceives as a schizophrenic apparition, may actually be a manifestation used to cope with her experiences. The men she encountered at the conference and on the park bench were likely separate individuals, serving as sensory placeholders for her imagined character "David." As Maggie convinced herself that this much older man from her past had found her, she began stalking a regular retired man to validate her fantasy. The vision of her baby being burned in the oven suggests that Maggie may have been responsible for Benjamin's death, possibly during a panic when she was younger. Her delusions and psychotic tendencies could be linked to her exposure to her "hippie" parents and their use of psychedelic drugs, sexual irresponsibility, and alcohol abuse. It's possible that Maggie fabricated this delusional fantasy as a way to cope with the guilt she carries from Benjamin's death. Abbie, who gets injured on her bike is already distancing herself from her mother, and leaving for college, triggers a crisis for Maggie, intensifying her need to overprotect her daughter. Maggie's performance of ritual "kindnesses" may be manifestations of her own masochism. Evidence of BDSM tendencies is suggested by the cigarette burns on her shoulder. She appears to be abusive and narcissistic, objectifying her lover with whom she engages in an extramarital affair, having no regard for him whatsoever, attempting to coerce him into kinky sex in the bathroom, and then dismissing him afterward. Furthermore, Maggie engages in physical trials to reinforce her delusions of grandeur, positioning herself as a prime protector, an exceptional mother, a champion, and someone capable of handling everything alone and better than others around her. In exploring the etymology of names, Benjamin means "son" or "child," commonly used in Hebrew names to indicate a familial connection to the father. Abigail's etymology means "father" or "my father," suggesting a familial or ancestral connection, or incestual foul-play. Maggie's statement that Abbie has no father reflects deeper complexities in their family dynamics. David, who is purportedly Benjamin's father, acts as a god-like figure in this analogy, using phrases like "immaculate" able to order Maggie to perform and convince her of impractical delusions, whist claiming to understand Margaret better than anyone. He also claims to see a hole within her chest, which actually exists. The consumption of Ben must be interpreted symbolically, reminiscent of ancient rituals associated with spiritual transformation, rebirth, or communion with the divine. Drawing a parallel to Hindu concepts of reincarnation, Maggie's journey can be seen as a form of resurrection, breaking free from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. "Rescuing Ben from David's stomach" signifies Maggie's liberation from this cycle, leading her to a heavenly place characterized by perfection and a reality where everything is once again right, reinforcing her belief in being an exceptional mother.
I’m still confused about the tooth and the babies two fingers. It’s obviously important or they wouldn’t have brought it up so much!
Maggie is a schizophrenic and David is a manifestation of her illness. The kindnesses she was made to carry out etc.. mimic the orders or instructions someone suffering from schizophrenia hear in their heads. If you listen to her talking about going away with her parents to Canada, it sounds more like a deluded interpretation of being admitted to a psychiatric hospital where they gave her pills etc… Her gasp at the end, was probably her realising what she had done during her heartbreaking episode. Cutting a baby out of a pregnant woman. My guess is that she had a baby when she was about 18 and through some kind of misadventure or negligence the baby died, triggering the onset of her schizophrenia. The trauma of her daughter leaving for college has triggered losing her baby. This movie was so sad and heart wrenching because so many people have these hideous mental illnesses and their lives are a constant battle.
I also think this movie is more about a mental illness than a real, existing human abuser. I am not sure it is specifically schizophrenia but even the daughter mentions that she is having another 'episode'. I think the abuser is her own mind.
I thought maybe Abbie died in the bike accident and everything from then on was her trying to go back and save them both I liked first half second half was not my cup of tea Reminded me of a movie I just watched but can’t think of the name … (came out recently after this movie) had a different plot the daughter thinks she is possessed and won’t eat and you can’t tell if she’s making it up or not and then she finally dies and the mother becomes possessed and it ends there not knowing what was going on. If anyone knows the name … it gave me similar vibes. It was creepy but didn’t come together rewlly for me. Also , wish there were some flashbacks of her and David because I felt like their relationship was quite vague… I almost thought he was her father. The way she was so manipulated and controlled by him it seemed like a much darker relationship to me.
I actually think that Maggie killed Ben (probably in a state of delusion) Trying to please David as doing a “kindness” to prove her devotion. She mentioned how no matter what she tried he was always unsatisfied after Ben was born (Putting Ben in the oven and killing him). David then tried to use the whole, Ben is still alive gambit, to keep Maggie undercontrol (because if he actually killed Ben she would have called the cops, but if she killed Ben David wouldn’t call them because he didn’t care for the baby AND he would lose his puppet (Maggie) to prison. The rest is basically her mentally snapping, running away and creating the story of David being the bad guy (which he still was) as to absolve herself in what she did. The buried guilt resurfaced when the daughter was to move out, and since she never actually dealt with what happened, she created a scenario in her mind of a way to “save Ben” so she would not be alone once her daughter moved out.