Was building towards something great. Then… that ending 🤦🏻♂️
After the shocking opening the film was a slow burn, but I didn’t mind because it felt like a Polanski film - and they often take their time, patiently laying out details and leading you down garden paths that only really come together at the very end where you get kicked in the nuts by a grim crescendo that makes you reflect on everything you’ve seen in a new light, haunting you long after credits roll.
When Teddy suddenly froze in the middle of her telephone call to Sam, and was once again selling out by not mentioning the type writer, I thought we were on our way to a Polanski ending - where all Teddy’s newfound morals were being swept away again as Jack’s evil spell took control of her. It was sophisticated, clever, and deeply cynical, like a dark shadow suddenly engulfing the sunny, comforting, morally stable world the film was about to end on.
Then you get what must have been a tacked on, dumber, simplistic ending where we’re asked to believe Jack gets into his killer costume and heads straight over to Teddy’s to tie her up, torture and stab her, until she shoots him, Sam inexplicably shows up, and they pull off the mask to confirm that Jack was indeed the killer all along. We suspected he was with the typewriter discovery but all nuance was swept away in those final moments, and Jack - master manipulator and evil genius - does something profoundly stupid and out of character.
Just when it looked like the film was about Teddy’s failure to do the right thing and the power of evil and sex to corrupt a good soul, just when it had something important to say about the legal system, it tossed all that aside for a cheap, schlocky kill the bad guy crowd pleaser.
Epic fail.