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Eternal Darkness of the Spotty Mind. (spoilers)

posted 12 years ago by budarc
1 reply | jump to latest

I'm fresh off of watching this movie and I've got a lot of ideas swirling around in my head. First of all, something was really off about that ending. It makes me feel like an ambiguous thread was placed very late in the game.

As I was watching, I knew one of two things would happen in the end. 1) Anthony's memory would be influenced by the cops, causing him to imagine things that didn't really happen (like killing his girlfriend). 2) It also occurred to me that maybe Tom was Anthony and this was his way of coming to terms with his wife's murder/suicide. Clearly the movie favors the former explanation, however at the very end, it blurs the lines by intercutting both Tom and Anthony's memories, making me feel like they were the same person all along. Obviously there's not enough evidence to support this idea, but the way it ended was just so strange. After a four-year period trapped inside an alleged killer's head, you would think the reunion between Tom and Abbey (and daughter) at the end would be played up, but it's hardly given any pause. It then cuts to Tom talking to Anthony's father about how Anthony was set up to take the fall. Is this just bad editing/filmmaking? I can't shake the feeling that there's more going on here than meets the eye.

One last thing: ending it at the bar, where he meets Minnie and she tells him it's nice to hear a familiar voice. I understand that he's experiencing feelings of withdrawal from his experience inside for so long, but then he looks up at the TV screen at the spokesperson promoting the product and absentmindly mutters "What if he actually convinces people it works?"...that also seems like a throwaway line, as if he had nothing to do with the project, it was just something he heard of on the TV (and therefore made up the entire movie in his mind). Again, I find it very strange that it would end on this note, when it's basically supposed to be a happy ending. Essentially, I just want to know the fate of the wife at the end, because it clearly doesn't seem happy at all.

Aside from this small hiccup, I thought it was a very well done movie, echoing ideas of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, placed in a thriller/mystery context. Would love to have some more insight into the very end though.

[–] emvan 10 years ago

I loved all that stuff on the end, because the movie remained true to its science-fictional concept. The sf ideas were not just an excuse to make us weepy about returning to his wife and kid. We get that scene and it is gratifying, but the movie moves on to wrestle with its actual issues.

I interpreted the final sequence, the reconstruction of the suicide from the POV of Anthony after Anthony was dead, as simply Tom's reconstruction of what actually happened based on everything he knew and had learned. I'll double-check, but I don't believe there was a Tom bystander in that scene.

That it is in the same visual style as when Tom is eavesdropping on Anthony's memories is very interesting. It suggests that in the course of four years of inhabiting them, Tom may have learned some things he's not consciously aware of. It suggests he is recovering the true memory of the fatal encounter from information he gleaned from Anthony and stored, buried, in his own memory, which he now recovers just as Anthony recovered the details of the assault on the night of the death.

Like another low-budget sci-fi movie released in 2013, Europa Report, this is a movie that's as smart as the person watching it. Folks giving it 5 or 6 are simply expecting something dumb, and dumbing it down to their level -- but it's smart as a whip.

Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.