Perfect Ambiguity SPOILERS

This movie for me illustrates the way I like ambiguity to work in movies. This stems from the fact that several contemporary movies - Inception, Black Swan, etc. - think that ambiguity means making you doubt anything that happened in the movie, reconsider the whole story and guess what's true and what's fantasy. I find this rubbish. A movie is a fiction, dream scenes in a movie aren't any less real than 'real' scenes. And it's so easy to do this: just take away a few scenes, don't explain something, and voilá, ambiguity!

Now this movie is very straightforward, nothing too difficult about its story. But the ending! I love the dilemma the protagonist finds himself at the end. He's a man oozing with machismo who spent the whole movie wrestling with a stranger for the attention of his wife. Things escalate to such a point that he accidentally throws him overboard. Now he's afraid. He think he's killed him. He goes looking for him. The stranger, hiding, comes back and has sex with his wife. Then he leaves. Back in the car she tells the husband what happened. Now literally at a crossroads he has to choose: he can go home and believe that he was cuckolded, which will hurt his male pride. Or he can go to the police, say he accidentally killed a man, and ruin his political career. The movie ends and we don't what will happen next. And that's what I love about the movie! The stories continues to exist long after the movie ends. What will he do? That's what we have to decide. Some movies want you to think about what happened, which I thik is unfair and pointless, but this one makes you think about what happens next.

The filmmaker doesn't need to add dream sequences or paranoid schizophrenic protagonists hallucinating to make you 'think about the movie' afterwards. He created a dilemma born naturally out of the protagonist's personality that continues to haunt our minds. That for me is excellence of ambiguity.

This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.