The nerve-wracking ending of Netflix’s ‘Don’t Move,’ explained by its star

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

Iris is a grieving mother who is willing to commit suicide out of the overwhelming despair of losing her son.

After visiting her son’s shrine in the mountains, she steps to the edge of a cliff. The fear increases as the camera tilts down to show the enormous fall.

Then a man, who says his name is Richard (Finn Wittrock), appears and lures her away from the edge, recounting his own tragedies about her life and telling Iris that “broken doesn’t have to mean hopeless.”

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

But the image of a hero saving a struggling mother is quickly shattered once they reach their car, parked next to each other. Before she can safely get into the front seat, Richard hands her a bag, zip ties her hands and feet, and throws her into the backseat of his car. He then gives her a paralysis drug that will make her unable to move or talk within 20 minutes.

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

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

Richard makes it clear that he’s done this with women before, kicking off the rest of the Sam Raimi-produced thriller that follows Iris as she desperately tries to survive – and finds the will to live as she fights to Richard to escape.

“I think the story is about loss and survival,” says Asbille. “There is a moment for Iris when she decides not just to survive, but to live. That’s really what she ends up getting away with.

“At the top she is ready to be with her son, but I don’t think she is ready to die. The film is the conversation she has with herself to live and to choose life,” she continues.

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

“I think it is important that she (has to) go through an arc,” she says. ‘Richard says in the car: ‘You wanted to die.’ And I think that’s something that really changes for her.

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

After many nerve-wracking scenes of near-death and near-escape, Richard receives a call from his wife, informing him that she and their daughter will be coming to his cabin in the woods that weekend.

Not only does this reveal more about Richard’s backstory, but it also puts an end to his plans to torture Iris, instead leading them to a lake where he plans to kill Iris once and for all.

He doesn’t know that Iris is slowly regaining her ability to move. She’s tied to his boat in the middle of the lake, luring him closer, as if she’s finally admitted defeat, so she can secretly grab the knife tucked into the back of his pants and run it through his neck into his can sting your face.

“I’m not sorry,” Iris says as she does so.

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

Once Iris reaches the gun, she sends a series of bullets at him to make sure he can’t come after her again.

In her haste to kill him, she riddles the small boat with shot holes. Just when it seems like Iris has survived her killer, the boat begins to sink.

She is dunked underwater and for thirty seconds the audience feels as if they have been punched in the gut, believing that Iris died after fighting so hard.

But not so fast. Iris surfaces, apparently after freeing herself from her knots underwater.

Asbille says she agrees with the film’s choice to save Iris because it gives her a fuller ending.

“I think the beauty is that there is an arc,” she says.

“The most important thing for me was that she has to go through a very emotional experience and an internal struggle,” she adds.

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

Iris heaved herself onto a nearby dock, reeling from the most recent near-death experience she survived. Soon she hears Richard pulling himself up onto land nearby.

She approaches his body, littered with wounds, blood spurting from his mouth, and leaves him with the same two last words he had said to his dying girlfriend Chloe: “Thank you.”

Asbille says this farewell message is twofold.

“I think there’s a real aspect to it, because in the end she saves herself, literally and figuratively,” she says. “And then I would also like to believe that there might be a little bit of – I don’t know if I can say this on the TODAY Show – ‘f— you.’”

Richard is left to die with the realization that she had won. The final shot of the film is solely of Iris, who takes a deep breath and stares into space as Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” begins to play, drowning out Richard’s labored final film. breaths.

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

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

Asbille says she wanted to embody a powerful message in that final image of Iris: “You keep moving.”

“I think when you go through that kind of sadness, it seems almost impossible to get rid of it and you’re going to have days like this that almost feel like ‘don’t move,’ but you keep fighting and you keep moving,” says them.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com