the cinema that i went to see this film at had technical difficulties in the last five minutes which really pissed me off!!
can somebody tell me what happens in the scene with the rapist at the end?
all i saw was him coming into his house and then thats it (think he might have sat down)...
You missed nothing.He just sat down and you hear his wife call him to bed from another room and he gazes at the tv.Didnt really understand what the overall message of this film was though?
shareThe last scene shows that the rapist was never caught. And it's also revealed that he had a wife and at least one child.
shareYes, very dark ending.
I think the film attempts to analyse aspects of Spanish society with its story, and the ending is perhaps in reference to something of a problem with domestic violence here (I am an Englishman living in Valencia).
Still strictly Catholic in many areas with emphasis on family and community, many women do not consider divorce an option, I think.
I don't understand your message... domestic violence? divorce? what film did you see??
I missed about the last 35 minutes :P and doubt i'll come across this again as it was on TV. Just read the very end, but does any fancy filling me in a bit. I fell asleep in the dad's section, his daughter was pregnant, etc, that's about all I remember before falling asleep.
Did her husband get the money and leave? Anything else exciting happen?
"Someone has to die Leonard, in order that the rest of us should value life more."
The dad kept asking questions and became convinced that the old man would not have left his cottage as he had lived there all his life, also he had bought a lot of provisions and fuel for the generator only the day before in the local shop. Later one of the villagers said he overheard the caver's wife speaking about buying a local house. The son-in-law became worried that he would be found out so he invented a sighting of an old man catching a bus with a suitcase in the next village. That evening the wife asked the son-in-law to take her out (she wanted to tell him she was pregnant) but he said he had to see someone. This made the dad suspicious so he followed the son-in-law out to where he was going to meet the cavers, to get the money. When the dad confronted them, he told the cavers that he would not say anything if they went away and never came back, he threw the money 80,000 euros! on to a bonfire. He told the son-in-law he had resigned from the police. I suppose he did this so that the son-in-law would have to stay in the village and bring up his grand-child. The cavers got away with it for their paynent but it was the wife who had caused the tragedy with pointing out the wrong man. I think that something should have happened to the rapist at the end. Perhaps he could have come home and found his house burnt down and his family dead. What do other people think? A very good film with that dark Spanish touch.
share
Thanks for going into so much detail. I really enjoyed it up until I fell asleep, and I wasn't really expecting much from something that was on late on a digital channel, they usually show rubbish.
I like the idea of the ending, the whole film was really about chance, and the killer/rapist was extremely lucky to get away with it. It reminded me of a Guillermo Arriaga film in that way, everything was changed by chance meetings and observations, for better or worse.
Thanks, again!
"Someone has to die Leonard, in order that the rest of us should value life more."
Just to say, I thought at the end, the killer went back to his house & it was his mother who spoke to him? I might have misheard it though & don't at all want to imply anything about single men who live with their mothers!
shareif it's his mother than he's sleeping with his mother. When she calls from the bedroom, he replies "I'll be there in a minute"
shareWhat I thought about the ending, is that maybe the director was implying that the rapist's unhappy marriage led him to, well, being a rapist. Perhaps, he was caught in a similar situation as the corrupt policeman at the end, forced to live with the person he doesn't love, because of the circumstances and that history may be repeating. Who knows what will become of policeman after years of unhappy marriage, being watched by his wife's father so that he could not divorce with her? Maybe that's a question the director is asking us.
shareI think as stated by a previous poster that the rapist returns to a household where he has a wife and child, and that in itself is what is so disturbingly dark.
How many others out there are in a similar situation? It's scary to think...
"oh mummy, oh daddy - lets all play Kabadi!"
I think that by showing the rapist coming home to his family, the director tried show us that this is "the guy next door". We all think of murderers/rapists or other criminals as these monsters, but the fact is that most of the time they're people with ordinary lives who are somebody's neighbour or relative and who go through life as normal husbands/fathers/epmloyees, until they're caught. And they don't always get caught, as this film depicted.
I don't think it was meant tho show the rapist's unhappy marriage as the reason for his actions. It just showed him coming home to a normal life and him being a normal guy with his own life, and everything that comes with it.
As for the older cop who burnt the money: I think he would've turned his son-in-law in, if it weren't for the fact that his daughter had just told him about the pregnancy and that she wouldn't be able to live if her husband left her. His only chance of any kind of justice was to prevent his son-in-law from getting rich from this whole situation. That's why he didn't want to know the details; he already knew more than he could bear. I feel he resigned, not to give the son-in-law his position and thus more salary, but because he wouldn't feel worthy of the job after what he had "helped" to cover up.
I thought it was a clever and realistic movie, about our actions and the consequences they have, but mostly, about how all of our lives are entwined, even if we aren't aware of it or don't want it to be.
Just think: if the boyfriend hadn't sent the rapist to the wrong road, he wouldn't have found and raped Gabi and Cecilio wouldn't be dead. If Amos hadn't cut off the water, Cecilio wouldn't be walking down the road, the others wouldn't have mistakenly killed him.
If the daughter hadn't been pregnant and talked to her father, he might have turned his son-in-law in etc. etc.
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I totally agree hyphenn - i feel thats exactly what the director intended to show . The price of trapped lives and the cost of trying to escape them . Also the setting of a decaying part of rural spain gave the film even more edge.
shareI thought the ending was showing how this man who had done horrible things and was the catalyst for the rest of the actions in the movie, was benign and oblivious to everything that happened. It was a poignant movie too because whilst this guy was a serial rapist and killer, what he did was not really seen in the movie as bad as what others were doing. He had no conscience. However, Esteban and the others did. Their lives were altered that day and this killer's was not. For him it was just another day.