and this time it's me I'm afraid. I must admit I lost interest in the movie with about half an hour to go, but can someone please give me the explanation as to what exactly happened between Maria, Diego and Mateo.
shareLOL - I'm 45 minutes into this film and came on with the exact same purpose of finding out what happened so i wouldn't have to bother with the last 40 minutes.
It's ssssssssssoooooooooo dragging
Ok - i'm going to stick with the film and let you know whats going on.
Although I'm not really sure.
56 minutes - Maria stows away in the pick up of a woman from the camping site. She confronts the woman, who claims not to speak spanish. She then treks through the wilderness into the night, sees a car and its the other boys dad, she runs falls and he takes her to hospital
58 minutes - The woman is identified as Tania from a photo, the former teacher whos gone mad and does indeed speak spanish after all.
60 mins Maria goes back to the caravan, sees Tania leave and enters for a look around. She then finds her son locked up.
Tania returns, they fight - its pathetic, but quite realistic. A fire starts and Maria is stabbed with some scissors. She then off camera knocks out Tania, fetches her son and drives off.
106 mins - O dear - Shes run out of petrol and here are the police, for some reason she doesn't tell him anything. But the officer helps her with some petrol. He gets a report of smoke on the beach, while she drives off to the ferry port.
110 min here we go, shes getting her son to hide in the back of a trailer of lockers to smuggle him on to the ferry - mental!
111 mins - the officer comes on, she dumps the car and she gets on the ferry as a passenger
113 - lOL - she goes to retreive her son from the locker and he's gone. Did someone get paid to write this?
114 - oh there he is - he got out of a locked locker on his own somehow.
115 HA - she falls asleep, her son vanishes again, and shes bleeding badly from the stab wound.
116 mins - theres her son with the stewardess - but wait - its not her son is it. Its Mateo i think, Shes imagined everything. The boy in the mortury was hers after all.
118 - the sudden realisation of it stuns her and i assumes shes thrown herself over the edge of the boat and the final scenes are of her drowning and imagining Diego with her in the water.
119 Oh but they don't want to finish there. Shes been fished out. Mateo is reunited with the mum in the wheel chair.
120 Heres Maria again- shes in a hospital - or is it a mental home? And theres the credits
Wow - wierd.
I can't remember exactly where 'half an hour before the end' is, so basically Maria discovers from the hotel manager that the German woman was the former local school teacher before "losing her head" when her husband left her. This means she speaks perfect Spanish and therefore lied when she told Maria she spoke only German and couldn't help her.
Maria drives back to the German woman's caravan and goes inside when the German woman leaves it to take some rubbish away. She finds a bedroom door with a chain on the outside, and when she opens it she dioscovers her son Diego, filthy and subdued, still wearing the clothes he disappeared in, and he tells her he 'isn't allowed out because he's sick'.
She picks him up and starts to leave the caravan with him, but the German woman comes back and starts speaking in German "my liebling" (my child?) and the two women begin to struggle. While they are fighting the child slips outside.
Maria initially gains the upper hand, and after subduing the woman goes to attack her again, but the German woman sprays a can in Maria's eyes, blinding her. They struggle again, and a pan on the stove is knocked, setting the caravan on fire. While they are grappling The German woman grabs a nearby pair of scissors and stabs Maria in the stomach with them. She then goes back into the bedroom.
Maria struggles to her feet, pulls the scissors out and clutching her wound oes after the German woman. We see her throw her across the room and she slumps to the floor, unconscious. With the fire catching hold Maria leaves the caravan.
When she goes outside Diego is nowhere in sight, and after screaming his name several times she eventually spots him huddles between the car and the caravan. Telling him "it's all over now" -she has to shout this at him she picks him up and carries him to her hire car. There he lies down on the back seat and goes to sleep.
Her car runs out of petrol on a lonely road but the policeman comeas along. She does not tell him what has happened, presumably suspecting that as 'everyone knows everyone else' on the island he might side with the German woman. (In the photographs on the hotel wall we saw the German woman with the policeman)
He gives her some petrol from a can he keeps in his jeep, and does not spot the child asleep on the back seat. He is called away when his police radio reports a fire on the beach.
Maria drives to the ferry terminal, but sees the men looking in the cars as they check tickets. Spotting the luggage lockers waiting to be loaded on the ferry she tells Diego that they will play a hide and seek game, and she takes him to the lockers and puts him inside one. She then buys a ticket and gets on the ferry as a foot passenger.
She sees the policeman's jeep come to the terminal and he tries to get on the ferry but the ropes have already been cast off and the ferry leaves for the mainland. She then goes down to the car deck to get Diego, only to find the locker empty and him gone. Shrieking his name she eventually finds him huddled nearby, and he says he doesn't want to play this game any more.
She takes him to a seat and they both fall asleep, her holding his hand. We can see that her stomach wound (from the scissors) is bleeding heavily.
Maria has terrible dreams, featuring Diego and the child's body in the morgue on fire, and when she wakes up he has gone, and once again in a panic she searches the ship for him. She finally sees him, speaking to two of the stewardesses on the ship. They look up at her, and when Diego turns round we see that he is not Diego at all, he is Mateo, the little boy of the same age who disappeared at the beginning of the fim.
She rushes outside and stands at the ship's rail, and we see her realise, in a series of flashbacks, that the child she saw playing on the beach, the child in the caravan, the child she hid in the luggage locker was never Diego at all, but Mateo all along. We then flash back to her viewing the drowned child's body in the morgue, when she denied it was Diego, and this time we see the body is wearing the brooch pinned on that she allowed Diego to wear when they set off on holiday. She realises that Diego did fall overboard and drown, and she too falls overboard and we see them meet up under the water. Diego then swims away from her.
We then see her being carried off a lifeboat with a mask strapped to her face, and she is carried past Mateo who has now been reunited with his Mother.
The last scene is in a hospital, where Maria's friend Laura has just visited her. Maria is wheeling a drip on a stand and when she returns to her room she passes other patient's rooms, some with visiting children in them. Finally she passes a room where a little boy -with his back to her- stands by a man in the hospital bed. When he turns round we see he is Diego, and Maria smiles. She is now seeing all similar children as Diego, and has presumably lost her mind.
(Although it seems to be a regular hospital not a mental hospital Maria did say to Laura that the windows are sealed).
<<<END>>>
There. Sorry that was a bit of an essay, it might have been quicker for you to just watch the rest of the film... ;)
I prefer Imaginality to reality.
Wow - thanks for the detailed explanation.
shareThanks! I'm trying to write the synopsis, but I didn't know how to describe the ending. It's so confusing!
shareNice explanation Julie Robin. My thoughts were that the flashbacks were telling us that she had seen the brooch on Diego's belt and she had constructed this alternative reality to deal with the trauma of losing her child.
And I didnt find the film boring.