Lifeline Movie Ending Explained & Full Story: Is Steven Dead Or Alive?

You can’t sit through a one-and-a-half-hour film where the protagonist only talks on the phone if it’s not an extremely good film. The term “lifeline” refers to a crucial thing that a person relies on, and Feras Alfuqaha’s mystery thriller of the same name is as good as it gets. Alfuqaha, in his directorial debut, uses sci-fi elements in a thriller story with ease, and thanks to the crafty editing, it’ll have you stuck on the edge of your seat.

Spoilers Ahead

What happens in the movie?

Steven Thomas is a psychiatrist who volunteers for a mental health hotline called Lifeline on New Year’s Eve. His everyday life seems normal; he gets along with his wife, Vivian, and son, Jeff. He’s also writing a memoir based on his early life. Steven’s perfectly mundane life comes to a halt when he starts having nightmares involving his experiences at a young age. He tried to seem okay and move on, but New Year’s Eve wasn’t meant to be normal for Steven. If having to work the ‘graveyard shift’ on a joyous day wasn’t tragic enough, Steven’s night as a hotline operator tops the tragedy. After dealing with multiple calls, Steven faces something he never expected, a call from his younger self.

How does Steven save Mary?

Upon arriving at the office, Steven learns his supervisor has to leave urgently to babysit, leaving him mostly alone for the evening, except for one woman who is also about to leave. His first real challenge of the night is handling a call from a woman named Mary. Mary wants to kill herself, and she calls the helpline because it’s supposed to be anonymous. Steven, being a psychiatrist, handles Mary’s emotions with care and asks for more details about her life. Mary confesses that she has collected enough sleeping pills and antidepressants to end her misery. Steven convinces Mary not to end her life, and he finds out that it’s her husband who’s causing it. The husband is abusive, and he went berserk on Mary when he found out that she was seeking therapy. Steven establishes a safe word, “he’s so wonderful,” in case her husband walks in, and Mary starts to feel safer. However, Mary seemed extremely suicidal as she cut the call while Steven was trying to reassure her. Steven receives a call from Mary’s husband after a while, and it’s clear that he forced Mary into apologizing to Steven. Steven managed to get Mary’s address earlier, and he’d contacted Officer Fredericks for assistance, who was already en route to the same location, as dispatch had received a call from Mary as well. The police get there in time, and Officer Fredericks informs Steven that Mary’s been hit on her head and has been taken to a hospital while her husband’s been arrested. 

What is happening to Steven?

After the situation with Mary is resolved, Steven receives a phone call from a young boy whose name is Steven Thomas as well. The boy wants to end things, and he’s decided to shoot himself at midnight. When the caller says he studies at UCLA, Steven finds it ridiculous since he, too, studied at the same university. He puts the caller on hold and calls his son, Jeff, thinking he’s the prankster freaking him out. But Jeff isn’t the one behind this, and that worries Steven. When he goes back to talk to the caller, he’s not happy being put on hold while he just said he’s suicidal. Despite Steven’s earnest reassurances, the other Steven hangs up, leaving Steven confused about his next course of action. 

Steven’s nightmares involve his father abusing his mother, and he and his elder brother Andrew talk about how Steven’s memories are fading. Andrew feels for Steven, as he, too, has chosen to suppress these traumatic memories from a young age. Andrew knows he could’ve done more for Steven, but he chose to focus on college instead. After talking to Andrew, Steven calls his wife, Vivian, and asks her to recall what they were like when they met and started dating. Now, here are a few important details that come back later in the movie. When Steven and Vivian started dating, they wrote a physics paper together, which tried to prove the existence of the multiverse. Vivian also reminds Steven that they almost broke up when Steven opened up about his abusive father. Steven then searches for an author named Matt Shoveens on the Internet. Vivian earlier told Steven that she’d had coffee with Shoveens, and given him a copy of Steven’s memoir for him to read. Steven sees that Shoveens writes sci-fi and true crime novels. A specific novel titled “Time Warp on West 3rd Street” catches Steven’s eye, and the plot involves a doppelganger. Just when he’s stalking the author, Shoveens himself reaches out to Steven, and he seems impressed with his writing. Shoveens wants to read more about Steven’s dynamic with his father, and Steven realizes that Vivian didn’t send him the entire script. While they’re talking, Steven experiences a minor earthquake and hangs up on the author. Steven tries to call his son Jeff, but surprisingly, someone else picks up the call, and when he calls again, the voicemail says Tyler instead of Jeff. Things get worse for Steven, and he finds his wife’s internet profile no longer reads Vivian Thomas, but Huxley. The husband in the pictures isn’t Steven, but someone else. Steven starts to realize that reality has been altered, and a flashback confirms that in this reality, Vivian and he did break up when they were in college.

How does Steven uncover the truth about the caller?

The mysterious caller reaches out to Steven again, and this time Steven genuinely tries to dissuade him from killing himself. The caller doesn’t care for Steven’s advice, as he has no wish to be saved at this point. Steven tries to uncover the reason behind the caller’s behavior, and guess what? It’s his abusive father. The caller becomes agitated while discussing their father, causing the lines between realities to blur. Midnight is approaching, and Steven has guessed that the caller is in the same motel that’s mentioned in his own memoir. He calls Officer Fredericks, telling him to reach the motel, and keeps trying to change Steven’s mind. As the clock ticks midnight, caller Stevens asks him to tell a story. Stevens starts to realize that he’s reliving his own memory, and he’s scared for his own life. He admits to the caller that he knows everything that his father did, which includes killing his mother and covering it up. When Andrew left for college, Steven was the one who was abused by his dad. Steven hears a gunshot from the caller’s side, and a massive earthquake wrecks Steven’s office. 

Does Steven kill himself at midnight?

With his wife being someone else’s wife, his son non-existent, and his whole life dependent on the decisions of his younger self, Steven is waging a desperate fight for his survival. Officer Fredericks calls Steven to tell him that the motel room is empty, and there’s nothing but an old bullet hole in the bathroom wall. Steven’s memories play hide-and-seek with him, and he can remember that there was a point in his life when he was in that motel room. A disoriented Steven sees a boy in a hoodie lurking around his office. When Steven chases after him, the boy goes inside a room called the project testing facility room. Steven overhears some vague dialogue that sounds like doctors speaking, and the security of the building appears to scold Steven and show him out. 

Steven comes back to his desk, and his line rings once again. The caller is the sister of the prank caller, whose name is Julia; guess what? Vivian’s sister is named Julia, too. The caller apologizes to Steven for the inconvenience, but Steven is sharp enough to tell young Vivian to look for young Steven and gives her the address he read of earlier in the news article. Vivian was confused, but sensed that Steven needed help. Finally, Steven remembers the time when he was sitting in the bathtub with the gun in his hand. 

Is Steven dead or alive?

Older Steven is overwhelmed, and rightfully so. His memories show us that when Steven called the hotline, it was a certain Steven Jefferson who answered the call. Steven Jefferson told Steven about him writing a memoir, and older Steven realizes that he named his son Jeff after Jefferson. When older Steven looks at his computer screen, the synopsis of Shoveen’s novel, “Time Warp on West 3rd Street,” comes up. The novel is about the main character finding out intimate details about her childhood. When he looks out of the window, the street outside the building is called 3rd Street. The earthquake returns once again, and now older Steven is on the floor, crying and praying for his life. We see young Steven in a coma lying on a hospital bed, with Andrew and Vivian looking over him. Young Steven is still alive, but what about older Steven? Was he real? 

What happened when Steven shot himself?

I didn’t think older Steven was real for a second. The movie feeds us with the idea of older Steven and his perfect life, but the clues were hidden all along. Older Vivian saying they almost broke up when that actually happened means that Steven, in his comatose state, imagined a future where their breakup was just a bad patch in their lives. Steven believed that things worked out between him and Vivian, and they lived happily ever after. His son Jeff isn’t real, just wishful thinking. In the adjacent hospital room, Mary, the woman who was getting abused by her husband, is seen talking to Officer Fredericks. The code word he made up with Mary, ‘he’s so wonderful,’ is the title of the magazine Vivian is reading at the bedside. The security guy older Steve encountered is a hospital staff member who works in maintenance. So everything around Steven played a part in giving birth to the imaginary world, in which older Steven lived. 

The story of the film is oddly similar to a Reddit thread I bumped into years ago, where there’s a guy who, in his unconsciousness, lived a life with the woman of his dreams and had a perfect family. It was only when he came across a lamp in his living room that the lamp seemed off, and he couldn’t figure out the meaning of it. After staring at the lamp for days, he had an epiphany and realized that his perfect life was nothing but a figment of his imagination, and he eventually woke up. Here, Steven was just fine before going to the hotline office, where he himself once called to vent before trying to kill himself. When he faces his own younger version, he breaks out of the make-believe world. When younger Steven shoots himself, older Steven’s world comes crashing down as he realizes he did actually shoot himself all those years ago. The bullet hole was old because in older Steven’s life, it’d have been decades after the incident. 

Lifeline’s ending can be seen in different lights as well. It could be a talking point about the multiverse, where the same people from parallel worlds collide with each other. It can also be a metaphor for Steven finally accepting the reality of his state, and maybe that will help him to come out of the coma. The somber ending, however, doesn’t confuse us enough to forget how confronting your inner demons can be the hardest thing in the world. Recovering from abuse and trauma is a tough road, and the brain can’t always comprehend that. 

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