MovieChat Forums > The Slut (2012) Discussion > The Ending (*big spoilers*)

The Ending (*big spoilers*)


I didn't get the ending to this film at all - it took a moment for it to register at first, but I'm fairly sure I know what happened, but I don't understand why it happened, or what it is supposed to mean.

It appears that Shay took Tamar's young daughter to Shay & Tamar's bed and had sex with her, and Tamar arrived home, saw through the window what was happening, went to the house of one of her lovers, and her lovers (or the men in the community) then beat up Shay. Tamar then found him in the morning and held his head to her, and since he moved his legs he was evidently beaten, but not dead.

So then: why did he do it? Was he a paedophile all along, just waiting for an opportunity to prey on Tamar's daughter? I'm not sure that is the case, because he did it when he knew tamar would come home... So, was it some kind of revenge act to hurt Tamar because she was sleeping with other men? That doesn't make much sense, because why hurt her daughters in such a despicable way? It just doesn't make any sense.

Also, why is she holding his head to her heart so tenderly at the end? Like I said, he definitely appears to be alive, and she is embraciing him - if he hurt a child of mine, I would kill the guy, preferably in a really painful way, too.

There was a lot of very beautiful cinematography in this film, and it had an interesting premise (with regards to female sexual promiscuity vs sexual conservatism/"ordinariness"), but I just didn't understand the ending at all.


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These are very good questions and I think your presumptions (about the revenge act) are correct.

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Just bad, bad, bad. It really didn't tell a story that people were dying to hear. Even if they wanted to explore pedophilia, a dark topic as is, they could have done it with a more compelling storyline. So many things happened in this movie that didn't make sense. Why does she feel compelled to have sex with so many guys? Why can't she say no instead of making the excuse, having pretended to knock over a carton of eggs accidentally? Why do they live in such primitive conditions, yet have cell phones? Why does she tell him to "come inside of me", and then go have an abortion without explanation? Reprehensible AND confusing. It's just a pure bore-fest. And I'm with you, why would she cradle his head after his deserved beatdown for having molested her kid? If this is the kind of screenplay writing that yields awards in cinema, then the world's gone mad. It seems that independent filmmakers can just put together a somber tale in a foreign land with subtitles about tortured souls who do dumb things for dumb reasons, with drab dialogue when they talk, or sometimes just string together a bunch of banal scenes without dialogue....and voila, they think they've made a masterpiece. And pretentious, poser, wanna-be snobs feign culture and sophistication by embracing such rubbish. It's a poor movie, by almost any standard. If you don't want to lose the full hour and a half of your life, you can put the DVD on Fast Forward 1, and it's still possible to speed-read the subtitles.

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I'm not as hard on the film as others here, perhaps.

The thing I took from it was the film maker showing how easy it is to make viewers (or real people in life) go down a very long path during a film in which you just know (or you think you do) where the film is and where it's taking us.

But like in real life, all is not what it seems in the end, sometimes.

We thought it was a genuine love story, where Tamar would have redemption and settle down from her promiscuous life.

But in the end, she ran into a man who probably saw what she was, and he knew her from year's past. He knew there was no responsible man on the premises, and the mom was distracted a lot with her business and her daily men.

So Tamar and her daughters were sitting ducks for a grooming pedophile.

That's perhaps why the twist at the end. The film maker is saying, you thought you knew what this story was about?

Think again...it wasn't! He was a standard, grooming pedophile who targeted an absent single mother with two young girls.

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I've only recently seen this on a youtube low quality and very grainy rip. So I totally missed the young girl in his bed at the end. Several other industry reviewers have pointed it out, though ("pedophilia as a subject matter of this film.") After thinking about this I THINK the director's point is that the main character's morality was actually "better" than this man's. She is holding him at the end in a "forgiveness" of his own "uncontrollable" sexual lust and immoral failing in action as well as heart that he himself would not forgive her for (after the first couple of times she "slipped" PLUS her heartless abortion.)

Basically the idea is that we are ALL merely "animals" with uncontrollable psycho-sexual lusts that drive our actions. Volition (moral "free will") doesn't really happen. So, there was nothing really wrong with her servicing all those other men in her community - it was just "natural" for her even though SHE never receives any actual sexual pleasure herself from that - merely a certain social standing and power. Ignore the Ten Commandments and actual social justice positives of those Ten Commandments. Also ignore how she was so willing to leave her own daughters alone with a man she seemed to have some doubts about early on - like how much time he spent playing with and "bonding" with these two young girls.

Personally, I am not the least bit convinced she was "better" than him in the end - I think they were both rather equally bad (and I pity both her poor daughters) - and does Israel REALLY have a kind of "white trash" problem???

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That's what I think or pretty close

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