About that ending (spoilers obviously)

I'm referring to the final scene, in which Anna basically returns to life.

That is unclear to me as well.

After Frank dispatches Iris, he puts his ear to Elena's chest and the soundtrack is a heartbeat quite loud, which strongly implies that Elena is alive. Then the older man picks the lock to get into the house, finds only Iris' body in the hall where it was left, and Frank, apparently dying fast, by the blazing crematorium in the taxidermy studio.

After Frank expires, the camera moves to the crematorium's window showing that there is something that could be a human body inside. Almost the next shot is the table beyond the crematorium on which lies, apparently, Anna's corpse. The implication seemed to be that it was Elena in the crematorium.

When Anna's body is finally brought to the priest to be coffined (and hopefully buried) and then awakes, I took it to mean that Frank actually burned Anna's body and made up and dressed Elena's living, (but comatose or drugged), one to look dead. If this is what the filmmakers had in mind it was an extremely opportune moment for Elena to awaken as they were starting to screw the lid on.

The big problem with the above as an answer is that as the older man is delivering Anna/Elena to the priest there is a verbal exchange (in a voice-over) between the men where the older man is explaining that he (or her father) had to pay a large sum of money to some gang just to find out where the body of "this poor girl" was. The priest says something about still having the check Anna's father originally left for the tombstone and other such needs, and the man replies that that "will help." While this conversation begins we see the man drive away from the house, presumably with Anna/Elena in tow, and a B&W photograph blows out of the car window and falls face up on the road and it looks like an image of the dead Anna, dressed in white, lying on some surface.

But what then happened to Elena?

Questions/Problems/Shaky Theories:

1. Gang? WHAT gang? And as far as I could tell, Frank and Iris were the only ones who knew what was going on. Frank was rich and in love with Anna, (well, her body anyway) - it makes no sense that he would have asked for a ransom.

2. If there was a gang and the voice-over conversation correct, it certainly sounds like some time (days) must have passed between Frank & Iris' battle and the point where the man picks the house lock to recover the body. But when he enters the house, sees Iris' corpse, encounters the moribund Frank, etc. it doesn't seem that more that a few hours (maybe a day at most) have passed. Frank seems to be dying of blood loss from the large wound in his crotch - he wouldn't have lasted too long. (In particular, it is another reason why Frank almost certainly didn't ask for any ransom - he wouldn't have had time to negotiate and collect it.)

3. If some time had indeed passed, why wasn't there an uproar of some kind about Elena being missing as well? The only people who knew she had been attacked were either dead or dying and anyway in the house. Nobody outside the house would have known what, if anything, had happened to her - only that she was missing.

4. Perhaps the photograph that blew out of the car was one of the glamour shots of Anna that Iris was gleefully sticking pins in earlier in the film. Maybe, since the pins had now been removed, Anna revived and gave us our closing scene. Then again, that would mean - as you pointed out - an eviscerated, stuffed, embalmed corpse with glass eyes revived while nobody, it seems, was terribly concerned about Elena ending up in the crematorium. (Or did I miscount the corpses? I can't quite recall what happened to the runner.)

I have a dubbed-to-English copy of the film from a torrent and the caveats are that the voice-over conversation kinda sounded like a last minute addition to the dubbed version. Also, my copy has a run time about 3.5 minutes less than IMDb's official run time, so there could be deletions.

The theories could continue, but basically, I think the filmmakers were either content to leave a few loose ends, (i.e. loose significant plot lines), or the uncut, undubbed version ties things up more neatly...or I just didn't pay enough attention.

Overall, quite a good movie, regardless.

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It was Elana who popped out of the coffin. They just mistook her for Anna because they look alike.

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