can somebody explain the ending? (spoilers)
At the end is she mad at her sister? Does she want nothing to do with her? Why does she leave the cross on the floor? Some insight would be very appreciated. Thanks :)
shareI think she's not only mad, but very disillusioned. Remember, she went on a killing spree because she thought her sister was dead. She wrote (in Russian) "I have nothing left to live for" (IIRC) when she thought her sister had been murdered. She had been raped, and chased, and beaten.
And all this time her sister was fine- the sister said "I was going to send for you in a few weeks" but was apparently too caught up in her new life to even think about her sister's welfare- which was supposedly the reason she had gone to Canada in the first place, to make enough money for her and her sister.
Plus, she had to be confused- was the man her sister was with involved in the sex trade? (I think he wasn't, but may have met the sister at the club and bought her freedom from the Russians, but it wasn't made clear.) At the very least, Karma must have thought her sister and the man were willing to let this sex trade to continue.
I think she was sickened by the fact that she had done all that she did for nothing- and all because her sister couldn't be bothered to get in touch, because she was so happy in her new life.
My question is, how did the cop "take care of it", as he said he would? A dead Russian mobster, two bullets in the cop, another mobster (female) dead elsewhere, and the gun which killed the mobster was inside the house of a "respectable" businessman- oh, and had been fired into the ceiling three times. He's got some 'splainin' to do!
thats an interesting perspective, I hadn't thought through her emotions well enough i guess.
As for the cop, I think he saw karma's crusade as more important than his assignment. Her was sympathetic to her need for revenge. He didn't want to dampen her revenge by restricting her actions. Furthermore, he has the chance to unburden her mind from the possibility of legal retaliation for her actions. He may very well lose his career for allowing her to do what she did, but hes doing what he feels is right.
Consider also her last act in the film, which is to tear her sister's cross from around her neck and leave it on the sidewalk.
This is almost cliched symbolism, but it applies. Not only has her revenge been for nothing, but she has come to realize that what she has done IS who she is, and she can neither justify it to herself nor believe she can be forgiven for it.
The cop won't make it all right as far as she's concerned. An ending lifting the film out of the standard vigilante catalog.
I think the ending was deliberately left vague and unsatisfying. Symbolism aside, it was in line with the whole message of the movie, one of moral ambiguity.
The most powerful scene at the end was when Karma's holding the gun, realizes Anna is still alive, and flashes back to her being raped, and all the people she killed, all for nothing. But it wasn't really all for 'nothing,' she did free the other girls who were being trafficked, and did kill some truly rephrehensible people. The women trafficked were effectively slaves whose spirits the pimps deliberately broke. You see Tomas doing this throughout, with his repeated rapes of the girls, his beating them down, and forcing them to do drugs to keep them addicted.
As to whether the guy who 'bought' Anna's freedom was the boss, we will never know. That, I think, was deliberate. He might have been, he might not have been, and Anna saying that she loved him may be because he broke her spirit and made her all dependent. We have no idea who he was, he could've been a top gangster who bankrolled the operation, or he could have been her savior. Either way, it goes in line with the idea that this is truly an 'underworld' where shady things happen, and nobody quite knows who is a good guy or who is a bad guy. In the world of human traficking, there truly is no 'happily ever after' or any actual 'success,' becuase the horror continues one way or the other.
This was a very surprisingly powerful film.