The shocking ending of Netflix’s ‘Don’t Move’, explained by the star

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When “Don’t Move” begins, main character Iris (Kelsey Asbille) is already living in the middle of creating her own horror movie. Did she escape in the end?

Iris is a grieving mother, ready to take her own life due to the overwhelming grief of losing her son.

After visiting his young son’s sanctuary in the mountains, he walks to the edge of a cliff, and anxiety mounts as the camera pans down to show the massive drop.

Then a man claiming to be Richard (Finn Wittrock) appears and pulls her back from the brink, talking about the tragedies in her life and telling Iris that “broken doesn’t have to mean hopeless.”

Thanks to Richard’s inspiring words, Iris retreats from the edge of the cliff and follows him down the mountain.

However, the image of a hero rescuing his struggling mother quickly disintegrates once they reach their cars, parked next to each other. Before she can safely get into the front seat, Richard shocks her, binds her hands and feet, and throws her into the backseat of his car. He then gives her a paralyzing drug that will render her unable to move or speak within 20 minutes.

For most of “Don’t Move”, Iris is drugged and unable to move or speak.

The drug was “a metaphor for the kind of loss and grief he’s going through,” Kelsey Asbille tells TODAY.com. The film is about “trying to overcome something that makes you feel stuck and paralyzed.”

Richard explains that he’s done this to women before, kicking off the sequel to the Sam Raimi-produced thriller in which Iris desperately tries to survive – and finds the will to live as she fights to escape Richard.

“I think this story is about loss and survival,” Asbille says. “There comes a moment for Iris when she decides not only to survive, but also to live. That’s what she gets at the end.”

“She’s ready to be with her son at the top, but I don’t think she’s ready to die. The film is a conversation he has with himself to live and choose life,” he continues.

Asbille says one of the film’s directors, Brian Netto, asked her if she believed Iris would have jumped that day if Richard hadn’t “saved” her.

“I think it’s important for her to go through a certain stage,” she says. “Richard says in the car, ‘You wanted to die.’ And I think that’s what really changes her.”

What happens to Iris at the end of “Don’t Move”?

After many touching near-death scenes and escapes, Richard receives a call from his wife informing him that she and their daughter will be arriving at his cabin in the woods this weekend.

This not only reveals more of Richard’s backstory, but also curtails his plans to torture Iris, instead directing them to a lake where he plans to kill Iris once and for all.

Little does she know that Iris is slowly regaining her ability to move. Zipping up on his boat in the middle of the lake, she pulls him closer, pretending to finally admit defeat so she can sneakily grab the knife hidden in the back of his pants and plunge it into his neck and face.

“I’m not sorry,” Iris says.

But Richard is still alive, so Iris starts rocking the boat to throw him overboard. When he falls, his gun flies into the air and she frantically grabs it, but she is still tied to the boat and is slowly regaining movement in her body so she can start to climb back onto the boat.

Once Iris reaches the gun, she fires a burst of bullets at him to make sure he can’t attack her again.

In her rush to kill him, she riddled the small boat with gunshot holes. Just when it seems that Iris has survived her killer, the boat begins to sink.

She dives underwater and for a good 30 seconds, viewers feel like they’ve been punched in the gut, believing that Iris has died after such a fierce fight.

But not so fast. Iris swims to the surface, apparently having freed herself from the knots underwater.

Asbille says she agrees with the film’s decision to save Iris because it gives her a full circle.

“I think what’s beautiful is that there’s an arc,” he says.

“The most important thing for me was that it had to be the whole emotional experience and internal struggle that he was going through,” he adds.

Why does Iris thank the serial killer at the end of the movie?

Iris climbs onto a nearby dock, recovering from the last near-death experience she had. Soon he hears Richard stretching out onto nearby land.

She walks over to his body, riddled with holes and blood gushing from its mouth, and leaves him with the same last two words he told his dying girlfriend Chloe: “Thank you.”

Asbille says this parting message is two-fold.

“I think there’s a real aspect to it because ultimately she saves herself, literally and figuratively,” he says. “And then I’d also like to believe that maybe there’s a little bit of – I don’t know if I can say this on the TODAY Show – ‘fuck you.’

Leaving Richard to die knowing that she has won, the final shot of the film is exclusively of Iris breathing deeply and looking ahead as Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” begins to play, drowning out Richard’s final moments of breathing.

Asbille says the wife of one of the film’s editors came up with the idea of ​​using “You Don’t Own Me” as the final shot of Iris.

“I thought it was a great final moment and song for the movie,” she says.

Asbille says Iris wanted to embody a strong message in the final photo: “Don’t stop moving.”

“I think when you go through this kind of grief, it’s almost impossible to get back into it, and you’re going to have days where you feel like, ‘Don’t move,’ but you’re still fighting and you’re not stopping moving,” she says.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com