The suggestion is that the Detective will find Keller and he is 'ok'. I mean, that's the best note we can go out on. Everything after Keller gets out of that hole is almost another different depressing movie. We know Keller is going to jail. That's immutable and way too long to and depressing to portray on screen. So they just left it at the Detective finally realizing the sound IS something and turning to investigate.
I thought that was a pretty clean way to get out of a really messy ending. The alternative is some cheesy exposition about how Keller was absolved of kidnapping and torture because he's just 'such a good dad'.
The ending works.
Here's a couple things that don't work:
We don't know much about Bob Taylor's psychology, so it's hard to argue for or against his motives to involve himself in the case. We do know that he somehow discovered that the girls were kidnapped by the person that kidnapped himself when he was a child. So he recognized Alex Jones in the press photo's after his arrest, as the child that he used to 'play' with when he was drugged and confined as a child? That's a stretch, but I guess the description of the vehicle was also enough to make him take a second look and become pretty certain. They should have cleaned up how he became involved and connected the dots before the police.
Here is a huge failing in the film for me. Keller returning to Mrs. Jones house after Joy is rescued didn't mean anything. He didn't do anything, and whether he had gone there or not, the Detective would have showed up at Joy's door. I mean, Keller's character had to disappear for plot convenience, otherwise the Detective would have been tied up interrogating him upon the discovery of Alex captivity, rather than going to notify Mrs. Jones immediately. Yet, the fact he was there never impacted anything other than Keller had to be somewhere the Detective couldn't find him and thus preventing him from going to Mrs. Jones.
Keller gave himself over to Mrs. Jones, despite he had Alex as an ace in the hole. He never employed this. Even if he suspected the cops had already found Alex, there is no way that information would make it to Mrs. Jones for quite some time.
Again, Keller could have just disappeared from the film after the discovery of Joy. The fact he went over to Mrs. Jones place didn't effect the course of events. At the very least, the fact that he was there needed to be noted by the Detective. Like, the detective could have just been knocking to notify Mrs. Jones of her nephew's recovery when he notices Keller's bags on the counter through the kitchen window.
What the heck WAS Keller's plan when he went over to Mrs. Jones, if he wasn't going to leverage Alex to get his daughter back? This part of the film was really stupid to me.
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