Else Movie Ending Explained And Spoilers: What Becomes Of Anx?

Body horror is a genre that can be repulsive at the surface with its graphic images and indifference to blood, gore, and violence. There have been films like the Saw franchise, which commercially made the genre accessible, garnering a somewhat niche following worldwide. However, for its sheer power of creating a language through impossible images, body horror was all along harboring the potential to become a genre that can house symbolism, dystopia, and even altered perceptions. In Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future we see the human body as a vessel for evolution, art, and utility. It is a radical shift for a genre that used to deal with surface-level graphic violence to evolve into one heavy with symbolism that wishes to be interpreted. The French horror-fantasy film Else is quite a mature addition to the genre in terms of how it approaches its protagonist’s psychology and pairs it with a strong visual language that singlehandedly carries the narrative of the film.

Spoilers Ahead

What Happens in the Film?

Starting off quite simply, Else seems like a potential love story between Anx and Cassie. Anx and Cassie have a one-night stand in Anx’s apartment, and it sparks a romance between two contradicting souls. While Anx seems to be on guard, careful, and particular about how things should look around him, Cassie is the ‘gross’ one who wraps herself in a blanket while sitting on the toilet and leaves half-eaten passion fruits around. Anx’s apartment is done up in peppy, bright colors—with quirky objects and toys meticulously placed. He soon gets to know about a disease that is rapidly spreading, which seems like a skin disease at first but turns out to be a condition where people are merging with their immediate surroundings and surfaces. The first victim that they witness is Mr. Mouaki across the street, who melds into the pavement. The disease is spread simply by looking at the infected person’s eyes. 

In a lockdown situation, Anx and Cassie are trying to avoid falling prey to the disease as their relationship undergoes peaks and lows. The only connection they have to the world is an ongoing chatter through the vents with the other residents of the building—Ms. Setsuko, Mr. Van Der Hoot and his wife, Suzanne. Soon enough, the disease enters the apartment, infecting Setsuko’s dog Baka, and Mr. Mouaki makes his way in in  the form of debris. Cassie catches the disease after she looks at Baka’s eye, and she starts melding into the bed. While the disease starts to engulf everything around, Anx tries to make his way out by talking to Setsuko. He is torn between the choices of leaving Cassie and trying to survive. On top of everything that’s happening, the burden of his mother’s death weighs heavy on him. The film descends into a surrealistic spiral of horror as Anx tries to cope with this ever-changing reality around him. The house becomes a living organism, and it is pulling him back—but what exactly is this disease, or should we say the vision of the disease? 

Are We Inside Anx’s Mind?

To figure this out, we must shed light on who Anx is. We never see Anx out of the apartment, and the only semblance of work that we see him doing is a graphic design gig on his computer. That and his room decor make it seem like he is an artist. In short, he has been living inside the confined space for a long time—at least three years from when he mentions Setsuko moving in. In one sequence, Anx mentions that he is a specially abled person who is in need of Cassie’s services as an aide. Although it is framed as a quarantine cover-up in the film to have Cassie in the apartment, we wonder if this is the truest version of Anx’s story. The disease, as we see it, is inexplicable, and it may very well stem from a pathological vision of Anx’s. To break it down, Anx narrates that his mother had cancer when he was eighteen and slowly faded towards death. Anx avoided staying home at this time and admitted to hugging her mother only when it was too late. She had gone cold, he says. Anx is anxious about loss, but he also cannot look at loss in the eye. To him, his mother’s death must have felt like a presence being removed physically from around him but fusing into his immediate surroundings. He did not have it in him to confront the reality of death—and he thinks looking the disease in its eyes can bring him down. He dwells in the uncomfortable creaturely presence of grief, loss, and memories that slowly becomes a cocoon around him, just like the house. We see sparse images of a nineteen-year-old Anx by his mother’s bedside, alternated with the images of when he takes care of Cassie. Anx’s bright, colorful facade slowly starts to disintegrate, first into sepia, then monochrome, and then into a blinding white silence. The trajectory loosely follows Anx’s mind going from mania to reality to depression and then an attempt to negate itself. Through all of it, the voice that anchors Anx is Setsuko’s, rising up the vent. The vent has transformed into a digestive tract, as the building has merged its residents and has come alive. From a larger glance, Anx is like a fetus inside the womb of that building, who can follow Setsuko’s voice to be reborn or stay forever in a fetal state.

What Does the Story of Lungfish Mean?

While Anx tries to stay afloat in the middle of the devourance, Setsuko tells him the story of the lungfish. All lives are born out of water, she says; the life forms had to make their way out of water to land even when they did not have the mechanisms to survive. In lungfishes, they used to be smaller creatures always preyed upon by larger fishes. So they started to take shelter in muddied water, which would suffocate them, till one day it did not anymore. In addition to their gills, the lungfishes grew their lungs, which eased their discomfort. Interpreting this in the context, Setsuko doubles down on the necessity of evolution to survive in a world that is weighing heavy on you. Anx never leaves the apartment even though reality is grasping him; although he may not have what it takes to survive the greater outside, he could have placed a bet on evolution. Like the little eyeless children he sees when he goes out with Setsuko. They are out there to adapt and live. However, with Anx, he can never leave his shell—and the shell becomes him as much as he becomes the shell. 

The film has a subtle commentary on how places and ambience can affect the mind of an individual to the point that they seem like an extended version of the place. The bedsheets, the walls, and the objects around Anx’s house become fused with Anx because they are his only reference points in the frame of his mind. He lives in relation to them and not to the external world. His mind jumps to fill the gaps that are there in the physical reality around him.

What Becomes of Anx?

Although Anx tries venturing out in the external world, he cannot sustain the reality. While Setsuko walks on to face the changed world, Anx retreats once again. For him, the house has become his object of desire—it has merged into Cassie, becoming an inseparable, fused entity. As he prepares to lie down and look Cassie in the eye, it is as if he is accepting his pathologized need for retreat. He does not want to evolve, face reality, or stray from his cocoon. Instead, he fuses all he loves into the space that holds him. We see Cassie’s face forming out of a steel needles toy that we saw at the beginning. Anx blissfully lies down on the floor and looks at the gigantic eye that Cassie has become. He partly confronts and looks at his object of desire for the first time, but by the time he does so, the disease has claimed both of them. There is no singular body—the mundanity of love within domesticity is such that you forget to trace the lines that separate one from the other. Essentially, both become one, and both also become the other. 

Else is a film that does not offer an easy answer. It is a prism of madness, distressing images, and an eerie sense of unexplained silence that hovers around long after the film ends. At its core, Else is not just a film about an infection but a film about how isolation, repressed memory, and unresolved grief can warp perception to the point where reality begins to dissolve. Through its visceral body horror and surreal visual language, it maps the psychological descent of a man too fragile to confront the world outside and too broken to face the ghosts within. Anx’s retreat into the womb-like apartment and eventual surrender to the disease point towards a psychological handicap of choosing familiarity over change and confinement over evolution.

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