The woman was a sociopath who will most likely be reunited with her son in Hell after she is caught and executed in the same gas chamber. (How appropriate.) Mikey was a lippy child who didn't have his ass beaten enough, but he never killed anyone. I am aghast at the people on these boards who appear to sincerely believe Mikey was worse than a mass murderer.
Haha I just got done watching this movie for the first time like 20 minutes ago. I came here and thought the same thing as I was quickly browsing comments. I honestly think people demonize him because he is a white male who comes from an affluent family and Consuelo is a woman who grew up poor in El Salvador and gets bossed around by this family who don't seem to care about her personal life.
Third law of physics. That family was grotesque and the nest of a little sociopath that would always be rewarded for his pathologic indifference to other individuals. I'm not condoning Consuelo's revenge but that little monster is very responsible for what happened. His problem wasn't the lack of some good spanking; he was the extreme product of his own material and moral environment, as Consuelo was hers. It was a brilliant ending; a very deep investigation on morality. Your difficulty to see Mikey as what he really was seems to me one of the points Solondz was trying to make.
So Brady had to die too. I don't remember him singing a DNR and he might have come out of it. But that's ok, we know what this filmmaker thinks about the disabled, right?
Ladies and Gentlemen take my advice Pull down your pants and slide on the ice.