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However, that’s not always the case, as some films have ambiguous endings.
However, when done right, these ambiguous endings are a feature, not a bug.
Here are 32 of the greatest ambiguous movie endings.
(…Or are they?)
As a warning, this list will inherently spoil the endings of all the listed movies.
32. mother!
The cycle continues undaunted.
Year:2014Director:David Robert Mitchell
30.
If this doesn’t work, he’ll have to be lobotomized.
Did the treatment fail?
His opponent, worried for The Ram’s health, urges him to tap out.
We will never know if this is the end for The Ram.
If it is, it was in the only place he could imagine himself.
Burns looks at himself in the mirror and then, chillingly, at the camera.
There’s a cut to black; we don’t know what happens next.
Don’t Look Now
Year:1973Director:Nicolas Roeg
24.
Was any of this real?
Or has everything since he stepped into Rekall been an implanted dream?
Has he always been a part of the Overlook?
Is this a sign that he’s joined its ghostly ranks?
Whatever the meaning, it’s an eerie, open-ended image to go out on.
Doubt
Year:2008Director:John Patrick Shanley
It’s fitting that a movie called Doubt would have an inconclusive ending.
What does it all mean?
We’re still working it out.
The bad guys won.
But the film ends with Bell, now retired, recounting two dreams he had with his wife.
The pair becomes obsessed with a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque show called The Pink Opaque.
I Saw the TV Glow will have you questioning The Pink Opaqueand a lot elselong after the credits roll.
It’s all so perfect and impossibletoo good to be true.
She managed to defeat the seemingly alien entity, but has she changed?
She knows the answer, on some level.
The real Kane self-immolated, and she’s talking to a Shimmer doppelganger.
And yet, they embrace, and both his eyes and her eyes glimmer.
Is it a joke?
Or does Gawain still need to die?
Court-martialed and dismissed, it’s unclear what life looks like for Galoup without the Foreign Legion.
Has Galoup found freedom?
Is this the afterlife?
Whatever it is, the final dance is strange, beautiful, glorious, and above all human.
He and his partner thought they could crack it, but ultimately they were unable to identify the murderer.
The exact words spoken may be ambiguous, but the emotion of the scene is clear as day.
Sometimes it’s best to just let the mystery be.
Batemanand the audiencehave no answers and experience no catharsis.
Mulholland Drive
Year:2001Director:David Lynch
“Silencio.”
Trying to parse what happened and input your meaning on the ambiguity is part of Mulholland Drive’s magic.
There are lots of other clues and pieces of evidence supporting one interpretation or another.
Even the people who made the movie have different beliefs on Deckard’s true nature.
The mystery is the point.
Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) has completed his unlikely reverse-dream-heist, and he can finally rejoin his children.
This is how he’s always checked whether or not he’s in a dream.
If it spins forever, he’s sleeping.
