MovieChat Forums > Eskalofrío (2008) Discussion > Can someone please explain what happened...

Can someone please explain what happened in the end?


My friend and I were absolutely baffled. We honestly have no idea what to make of the ending. Can someone please explain to me what happened from when Santi is saved by Erika in the house til the end? Idk why, I really couldn't understand the rest of the movie after that point. I was watching it with English subtitles though, and I know that a lot of times when subtitled movies are released in America, the movie is often translated incorrectly/with insufficient detail (see "Let the Right One In" for an example of this). if anyone could help me out, I'd greatly appreciate it.

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After the scene in the attic where Erika saves Santi and kills Dimas, the next scene is where the old man (most probably Dimas' father) tells the real story behind Erika to the policeman, Santi and his mom.
We see a flashback scene where it is shown that the German woman (Erika's mother) was accidentally killed by Dimas (after a brief scuffle when Dimas tries to rape the lady). This is seen by Erika's father and Erika herself.
Dimas panics and kills Erika's father too to cover his trail, all before Erika's eyes.
He was about to kill Erika too, but the old man saves her saying she was just a child and could do no harm to anyone. Also, the old man and his wife take the responsibility to raise Erika.
They later realize Erika was afterall not what they thought of her.
She actually was a very "wild" and "strong" girl, they realize when she kills the old man's wife and escapes into the woods. That was the last when anyone sees of her.
Erika then returns to take revenge and after killing Dimas, her revenge is fulfilled.
But, to be honest, even I did not understand the very last scene.

Can anyone help ??

:-)

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The nun gives Erika the rock. She wants her to escape so she will not hurt anyone else in the hospital and the nun realizes that they cannot help the girl. She belongs in the wild.

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Ok, I did miss some of this in the beginning (I turned it on when Santi, Tito and the other boy were walking through the jungle, just before being attacked - I was expecting a policeman's wife with nightmares, but this was a pleasant surprise), so maybe the answers to my questions can be found there, but since I have no idea when I will get to see this movie in its entirety, I will ask here.

I will start by saying that I really liked this movie. I'm not usually one to watch a movie in another language, I caught this one and it hooked me right from the beginning. I thought the kid that played Santiago (Junio Valverde) was EXCELLENT. He acted and reacted in a way that I thought was typical for a kid his age (awkward, hysterical, angry but not brooding), rather than a kid acting like an adult who's trying to act like a kid. It must have been so hard to have to keep calling up that kind of intense terror over and over, with the camera pointed right at his face for 10 seconds straight or more (ten seconds doesn't sound like a long time, but just try to make a scream or a reaction of terror last longer than 2-3 seconds - it's hard). He's going to great, I think. He's already acted with Guillermo Del Toro ("The Devils Backbone"), so I'm obviously not the only one who's noticed his talent. Although he has yet to have anyone post on his IMDb board - I might have to remedy that.

Also, Junio was actually young enough to be the kid he was being paid to play, unlike other examples where 25-30 year old men are hired to play teenagers ("Hannah Montana" and "Beverly Hills, 90210" come to mind). For being as young as he is, he did an excellent acting job.

On to questions:

Concerning the last scene: did it happen before or after her parents were killed? (I remember the nun telling Santi & Co. that Erika's parents had brought her to the hospital because she was so wild and that she had spent her entire time there trying to get away.) Was this shot supposed to be what happened just before she escaped for the last time, right before her parents decided to bring her back home? For her parents to have picked her up there, she would have had to be caught by the hospital police one last time. Or, did her parents find her in the woods and take her back to their house?

Or, was this supposed to have been Erika AFTER she killed Dimas and saved Santi? Did they clean her up, comb and braid her hair, lock her back into the hospital, only to heave her try to break free again? I mean, she looked pretty well put together for someone who had just spent (months?) living in the jungle. Seriously, soap and water can only do so much. Besides her mouth being pretty ragged and a few scratches on her face, she looked pretty good, not malnutritioned or scuffed or anything. How would they have gotten her to sit still while they combed and braided her hair again? Why even bother, for that matter?

Honestly, I thought she had stolen the rock from the gecko cage that she had been staring into, and had used it to slice the nun's Achille's tendon (remember when the nun had shown the kids her heel?). Before asking all of these questions (one question calls up three more in my head), I had thought that this was part of Dimas' fathers flashback, but now that I'm thinking about it, how would he have known her escape story? By the time he got close enough to her, she wasn't exactly a fluent storyteller, and her parents weren't talking.

As for the time line - does the story start with Erika's parents having a kid, kid turns out to be wild and unsociable, so they bring her to the nuns, the nuns can't deal with her, so they send her back home with the parents? And, although this little girl is supposedly starrting out wild with animalistic rages, her parents thought she might like a swing put up in the backyard, they dress her in cute dresses, keep her hair perfectly parted and 'tailed and bring her for walks in the woods to pick wildflowers (at least that was what she was doing when Dimas killed her parents in the flashback)? If she didn't go insane until after she saw her parents murdered, then why did the nun say her PARENTS had brought her there? The nun specifically calls them Germans, so I don't THINK she was talking about Dimas and his wife.

I have another question - how long WAS she in the jungle? And, why did she wait for Santi and his mother to arrive to start killing people? What had she been eating in the interim? Do they mention any of this in the beginning, maybe finding dead animals in the woods or something?

OK, wait, I thought of another one - why would she want to eat people at all? I can see her wanting to kill Dimas, but what about Santi's dad and that kid from the beginning? You'd think no one had even stepped foot in the woods, invading her territory. But if they hadn't, how would they have found evidence of her existance and know to be afraid?

Who am I kidding, I have a ton of questions.

How does Angela make it out of the jungle at the end? She's not even mussed up when she talks to her father about the search. Who found Leo and brought him to the hospital?

Why was Erika so attached to Santi? Shouldn't she have been just as afraid of him as she was of everyone else? Were they the first people to live in her old house after she broke free from Dimas' basement?

If the people in the village really had no idea that the "monster" in the woods was Erika Hassel, then who wrote all of those news articles about her? Or were those based on her behavior at the hospital with the nuns? SOMEONE must have known that she was out there still, or else the Google search for her name wouldn't have turned anything up comparing her to feral children.

Does only direct sunlight have an effect on someone who's allergic to the sun? I thought any sunlight would burn their skin, and even being in the shade during the day would hurt them. What was up with his "fangs"? Why were they only visible when the bullies were going after him?

Ok, I THINK that's it. For now. Heh.

I've got two good posts in me and I just wrote my third...

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[deleted]

It is likely that Santi gave Erika the gecko (plus terrarium) because he thought she would like that. After all, she probably went into his room to take the gecko out (an earlier scene in the movie). The hospital people might have thought that having a pet would be a good thing for Erika but didn't realize that the she could use the rocks from the terrarium as weapon. As a nun said earlier, she made the mistake of trusting Erika, and then ended up with a slashed Achilles tendon. Erika, being quite the skillful hunter, often goes for this spot when she attacks people in the movie because she must know that's the best way to keep a victim from escaping. So, I believe the last scene (which takes places after everything else) just shows that Erika's hunter's instincts are kicking in. When cats are about to attack something, their pupils widen so much that you can see only black, and the same happens to Erika (which I think is cool). If the movie would show more we would probably see her attacking the new nurse.

On my gravestone, I want to say "I told you I was sick." - Tom Waits

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Just watched Shiver. Two guesses on the ending.

ONE, it's present time, like has been mentioned. Santi gave her the Gecko, and the feral beast reemerged when she discovered the aquarium contents included a jagged rock. But really, she didn't seem that out of control. She was already wild in the flashback scenes, and she looked perfectly capable of maintaining stability. She even had the intelligence to cover up Santi with foliage, so he wouldn't be affected by the rising sun in the forest. She has emotions.

TWO, it's a flashback to her escape. This is explaining her connection to Santi; The Gecko she was fascinated with when locked away. She apparently scouted the small town regularly, anyways, so it would be another safe assumption that she knew he was an outcast just like her. Hard times make it easy for two people to bond, and are understandable across cultures and species.

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I had never thought about it being a flashback before, that is an interested concept and would make sense.

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