The following post contains unambiguous SPOILERS about famous ambiguous endings in cinema.
When you get to the end of a movie, there are a few things everyone expects. The story should wrap up, the conclusion should be satisfying, and the screen should cut to black. Seems simple, but sometimes movies throw a few more curveballs at you right in the last few seconds. Maybe there are questions left unanswered, or maybe the film ends on an unexpected and tonally strange image. Cue a million Reddit threads.
For some, the “ambiguous ending” might feel like a copout, a way to avoid tying up all your narrative threads at the last minute. For some films this may be true, but others use the ambiguous ending as a tool in and of itself, keeping the audience on their toes long after the credits roll. There is an art to the ambiguous ending. It gives you a sense that perhaps the story isn’t quite over. It makes you think, it gets people talking, and it invites you to watch the movie again and again to try to figure it out.
There are some ambiguous endings we still can’t get over, years and even decades after they first came out. These are the sorts of endings that turn the whole movie on its head and make you question just what it was you were watching for the last two hours. These are the endings that people just can’t stop arguing about, coming up with endless theories trying to explain them once and for all. For our part, we love an ending that makes us wonder. Sometimes it’s nice to feel like you’ve figured it out. Sometimes it’s more fun to keep things a mystery.
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Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
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