Dark Cuts Movie: All Five Stories Ending Explained

Horror comedy is on the rise as a genre—with additions like Weapons reenergizing the grim soul of horror while balancing it with a sharp, ironic and witty tone. Traditionally, horror as a genre has been quite all-engrossing—pulling the viewer into a spiral of darkness and threat. With spiritual or supernatural beings becoming the main threat—who at first wanted to either kill or possess you, and then evolved into a genre where they want to deliver psychological torment– it has always been sort of black and white. It wasn’t quite cutting the existentialism of the modern era; thus, horror underwent a fresh change in the hands of directors like Osgood Perkins, Ari Aster, Jordan Peele etc. al. From a genre, it sort of became a device to tell a larger spectrum of stories. In Dark Cuts, that’s exactly what happens—the directors’ ensemble uses the genre to tell five stories, each signifying a different kind of fear, while being largely entertaining as individual pieces. Some of the tales, like “Flowers,” tend to become more abstract, and some, like “Buying a Fine Murder,” are more plot driven. However, all of them are sufficiently funny, leaving quite an interesting mark in the anthology horror genre. Let’s take a look at the five tales and see what they tell!

Spoilers Ahead

The First Tale: We Do This Once

A hipster couple with limited means has a wonderful baby daughter. As they change her diaper while she coos and plays, setting an adorable, warm scene, the mother is determinately planning something that she convinces the father to do only once. The viewer is left to wonder—what is it? Are they going to give up the baby? No, quite the opposite. They want to raise it, but they do not have the money to do so. So what is the next feasible option? You would think it is looking for some work to get by, but no; they want to rob a bank! The father looks skeptical, but the mother goes into the bank and does it while firing her gun. Almost immediately, they are escaping town in their car. The father visibly panics when he catches a police car chasing them in the rearview mirror. When the officer stops the car, the mother tries to keep a level head, and it turns out they are just being handed a ticket for a taillight. However, soon it starts to feel like a decoy; as there is a scary visual of the officer eventually coming back to arrest them for the robbery. It flashes before their eyes in a glimpse before they jolt back to reality. Nothing happens, but the fear of getting caught will chase them at every corner in their journey.

The story is psychologically interesting—the title being “We Do This Once.” Sure, an act of robbery that gives them the money to raise the daughter is possibly morally justifiable to the mother—it is a mother’s survival instinct. However, any such act, even if committed only once, will hold the person psychologically hostage for a very long time, even if they can escape the circumstances. They are being jolted into the possibility even when an innocuous ticketing happens at a turn of the road. The guilt never wears off, but there is no other way of easy survival. This tale is an ironic, cautionary horror that warns the viewer about the psychological impact of giving in to crimes even if for once, even if for a noble motive.

The Second Tale: Hide Your Crazy

“Hide Your Crazy” is a cute, grotesque love story which may very well be symbolic. After dating Iris for six months, Dan has planned quite a spread of a birthday dinner for Iris. Iris is emotional at his efforts but soon realizes it is her time of the month—no wait, time of the month where she turns into a demon! Or is that a metaphor I am sensing? Iris says that her mother was a witch and her father was a demon she summoned, so once in a while she turns into a demon and has to eat flesh to survive. Soon it starts happening; even a salt circle or pig flesh is not enough to stop it. She unwittingly attacks Dan but also seems to know some coping mechanisms. She chews off Dan’s little finger and asks him to lock her in a room and leave. Dan, almost leaving, decides to turn back. He goes to her with a piece of birthday cake, wishing her a happy birthday. Dan has BPD himself—he tells Iris. Demon Iris calms down, and Dan promises that she does not need to do this alone. In exchange, Iris coughs up his unchewed finger with a half-embarrassed smile, telling him that she did not chew it after all.

Okay, this one’s adorable in its portrayal of mental health stigmas and how women are portrayed as the “crazy” girlfriend for whatever emotional bandwidth that men lack sometimes. People wear masks—usually, they have three selves—one they show to everyone, one they show to their close friends, and the third one true self. For a relationship to work, people need to be in their third self—unfiltered, with all the quirks and crazies—and be able to accept the other person in their truest form. While certain things may be a dealbreaker for some people, they are perfectly acceptable in certain relationship dynamics. The film is a sweet commentary on how to work out seemingly unsolvable issues if you only have the sympathy to not chew down on your partner’s finger, even if you have bitten it off due to unfortunate impulses. Cute, right?

The Third Tale: Flowers

This is the most ambiguous addition in the anthology, which could have many interpretations. There is this hypnotist who is treating a young woman who has a vision of a pregnant woman in a white shroud with roses as her crown and falling petals on her body. The visual is hauntingly eerie—and I assume that the therapist is trying to resolve a fear that Mia, the patient, has about losing a child, or even the loss of a mother. Or maybe it is a prenatal fear that consumes her—perhaps the patient herself is pregnant and needs to be stripped of these fears. However, towards the end of the tale, it starts to feel like Mia does not even exist. The hypnotist spirals into the visuals herself and ends up killing herself in the bath with a plastic curtain.

My interpretation, going by Mia’s dialogues about how Mommy missed the funeral after the eight-and-a-half-month-old fetus died, leads to the fact that the therapist was hallucinating Mia all along. Mia is her child that she miscarried—there is a visual of Mia being choked by the umbilical cord; there must not be abortion guilt since an abortion past eight months seems impossible, but perhaps the therapist has considered the miscarriage to be her fault all along. The sessions where she was seeing Mia were actually self-treatment of her split ego, but she fell into a fatal spiral from which she could not save herself.

The Fourth Tale: Heart to Heart

This is a tale of sisterhood gone wrong. I do not necessarily support this repetitive portrayal of women choosing to show solidarity with other women being painted in a bad light, especially by a female director, but it is what it is. There is a psychologically unstable woman who has captured the “other woman,” one who her partner Julian has cheated her with, to have a heart-to-heart conversation over a meal, except that the meal turns out to be Julian, the man in the middle, Julianned into pieces. She tells the other woman to be thankful for the meal and how men have to keep things bottled up, but women can share stuff. She proposes to have a girl time by painting each other’s nails, and when the captured woman goes to put the nail polish bottle in the fridge, she sees human flesh inside it. She attempts to flee by climbing up a window, but her captor soon catches up. As she runs across the field, the captor looks at her through her gun’s viewfinder but does not pull the trigger. 

Female rage is justified, sure. It can even be misdirected. But deflecting it on the “other woman” seems a bit archaic to me. I would have made an exception with her taking it out on Julian, and with a little suspension of disbelief, even to the extent of cooking him, as has been historically done a few times by angered women. But why pull this other woman into this? By making an oblique commentary on “heart to heart,” which is supposed to be a safe space, the author may be shedding some responsibilities as a feminist creator with no clear intent. I understand that the flimsy idea of sisterhood is being critiqued here, but to what purpose? The only saving grace is the act of mercy, or the ambiguous ending, where at least the woman survives. 

The Final Tale: When Buying a Fine Murder

This is an ambitious, convoluted tale of a hitman called Ronnie, who was hired off of the internet to kill himself by a Roman businessman called Walter Brandi. Walter does not know how Ronnie looks, but the two meet at a party where he tells Ronnie that he has hired the Wolf Order, Ronnie’s digital company, in order to bait them into his house so that he can kill the hitman instead. This sounds a lot like a Möbius strip level issue to me; the motive behind this is a letter from Valentia, whose husband was killed by one of the Wolf Order men. Meanwhile, Ronnie tries to find out links between his wife, Helen, and Brandi and discovers that Helen is working for a woman called Demetra who wants to kill him for his NFT called “Mule in Space.” Helen is a mole who attempts to kill Ronnie by poisoning him, but she steps back after knowing that his will is in his brother’s name and not hers. On the other hand, Brandi wants to be present when the Wolf Order guy comes in to kill Ronnie so that he can shoot him. He has chosen Ronnie for it since he knows that Ronnie sells fake paintings online to earn crypto. However, Ronnie goes one step ahead and sedates Walter in the evening. When Helen comes in, he mercilessly kills Helen and then wakes up Brandi to lead him into shooting his gun. Helen is dead, and Ronnie stages the murder scene in a manner that makes it seem like Walter fired his guns after a thief who already had killed Helen. Later, the investigation links Walter with Helen’s murder, and he faces trial, while  Ronnie goes scot-free, finds out about Demetra, and takes his revenge. This was quite an ambitious attempt at narrating such a complicated plot within the span of half an hour; however, the director probably did justice to the short story of the same name by Jack Ritchie. The story has the potential to be turned into a feature with a few tweaks here and there—for example, a little more character building and backstory would simplify the connections and the happenings for the viewer. It sticks to a thriller by its genre and is meticulous in showing what a perfect hitman Ronnie is!

Dark Cuts stands out as a sharp, witty, and layered exploration of fear, irony, and human instinct. With each tale elementally pulling on distinct strings of fear, it is quite a symphony that ties the anthology together.

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