The Twin Movie Ending Explained And Full Story: What Does The Fetch Signify?

“Doppelganger” is a German term famously used to annotate a twin self—a self that looks just like its original self, but it is evil. It is thought to be an apparition or paranormal shadow of the living person and thought to be a harbinger of bad luck in folktales and mythologies. The concept of doppelganger is German, but the same concept—in folklore’s signature way of surpassing space and time through its life span—has reappeared in many other cultures. The idea of a “fetch” is quite similar to that of a doppelganger. In Irish and English folktales, a fetch is a common placeholder for a doppelganger—a double entity that brings bad omen if seen by its living counterpart. The Twin builds on this folklore of fetch but also reinterprets it with a psychological twist—shaping it into a piece of modern horror balancing folk and psychological elements. Let’s take a look at the story and interpret its ancient and modern theories!

Spoilers Ahead

Nicholas and Charlie are parents to their only son, Jacob. The film begins with Jacob falling down the stairs while carrying a pumpkin. He does not survive the fall. Despite being present there Nicholas could not save Jacob, and he starts holding himself responsible for his son’s death. The death drives a separator in his and Charlie’s relationship—Nicholas tries to hang himself in the garden but ultimately survives it. Charlie thinks it is the best idea if Nick lives in his grandmother’s house for a while and she leaves separately. She also gives her wedding ring to Nick, as she is unsure about the fate of their marriage.Nicholas had lived in this house once before and experienced his grandmother’s death. It does not seem quite like a positive space for him to live in, but he is visited daily by a psychologist called Dr. Beaumont as per state rules. Dr. Beaumont tries a mixed method of hypnosis and therapy to exorcise the grief out of Nick, but Nick starts falling into a spiral of visions. The portrait he is painting of his son gets smeared at the face, the face vanishes from all the photographs, and he starts hallucinating an entity who looks just like him in different corners of the house. He also sees his grandmother’s ghost and feels its malicious presence in his bones. Nicholas looks into a book of folklore and finds out about this entity called a fetch and believes that it is haunting him. The fetch manifests as himself, his son, his grandmother, and sparse auditory and visual hallucinations with Dr. Beaumont and his neighbor Ms. Shelby’s grandson. With the lingering presence of grief and guilt and the entity, it becomes difficult for Nicholas to separate the reality from the haunting. 

Dr. Beaumont, who is also weighed down by the grief of losing his daughter, comes over to help Nicholas. Charlie also comes along, and they all experience the hauntings of the fetch, which is driving Nicholas to kill himself. Nicholas’ crisis is that he cannot remember the face of his son Jacob. While Nicholas is about to hang himself, Dr. Beaumont actually uses it as a method to heal him; he lets Nicholas confront the fetch and lets him get transported to the pumpkin patch with his son. In front of the noose, Nicholas feels like he is dying, but it is actually the twin—the grief-stricken, guilt-laden version of him—who dies. Nicholas is able to look himself in the eyes—and he completes the portrait of his son in the end. 

The Fetch, mythologically, is a double self—one that is the harbinger of bad omen. While there is evidence of the fetch existing according to its epistemological supernatural sense, the film also uses it as a metaphor. In a sense, it is difficult to point out where the myth is ending and the psychological interpretation is beginning. Nicholas’ first encounter with the fetch was when he saw his grandmother pass away. Ms. Shelby recalls Nicholas banging on her door on the night his grandmother passed away, scared and claiming that a malevolent entity had broken in. Later, there are visuals from the night where the grandmother forces Nicholas to confront himself in the mirror and see the entity. Psychologically, this may be the beginning of a schizophrenic split; a high-stake trigger such as death unfolding can split the mind and humanize the crisis into a readable hallucination of an entity. The child’s mind, unable to process the stark reality of death, resorts to a known story of a known evil, which makes it easier for the brain to interpret events. 

While this was a key event in fracturing Nicholas’ mind, the mind is triggered once again with the death of his son Jacob. This time it is grief and guilt compounding upon the fear of facing death. In this way, by ascribing it to a fetch, Nicholas externalizes his internal suffering—it is like he has someone to point fingers at and shift the blame to. The unbearable responsibility of his son’s death weighed him down to the point that his mind split into another self. Often, the split selves are actually protector selves, but in this case, it becomes an extension of his complex grief and guilt. 

The function of this entity, fetch, becomes punitive. Sightings of a fetch are ascribed to bringing impending death—psychologically speaking, a death drive. Nicholas, who already survived his attempt to end his life, now assigns the responsibility to the fetch. In this way, he does not have to bear the burden of reality and can easily slip into the comfort of a childhood tale where he is no longer the villain, but he becomes the victim. Note this transition—this is a father who thinks he has failed to protect his son, automatically making him the biggest villain in his own eyes. When he succumbs to a force bigger than his own control, he regains the psychological position of blamelessness—he can have the relief of being a victim once again. 

Nicholas’ key struggle dwells in the realm of his memory. The first occurrence that comes with forgetting is not being able to remember a human being’s certain attributes—like their face or their voice. It is claimed by forgetting. The grasp on memory somehow loosens more when one focuses more and more on remembering the little details. I would like to imagine remembrance as a sort of Gestalt method—where the wholeness is grasped at once, rather than as a result of its little components. Hyperfocusing on each detail through his painter’s eyes, Nicholas’ brain starts to forget the attributes of his son’s face. This is a grief that he cannot bear, and the grief itself becomes a faceless entity that starts to haunt him.While he cannot complete the painting, on the final night Nicholas ends up painting the entity all over the house walls. It is him reimagining his grief—whichmust have been cathartic for him. Rather than preserving his son’s happy face, he needed to face the ugly portrait of his own grief. Nonetheless, when Dr. Beaumont and Charlie actually intervene by shifting him into a hypnotic trance, the resolution that his mind seeks is seeing his son just once more. This is where Charlie steps in—her recalling of their son’s features sort of becomes a chant that rescues Nicholas. As she mentions the curves, the freckles, and the happy eyes, Nicholas is able to remember his son. This is his closure. After the storm passes, Nicholas completes the portrait just as he had remembered his son. Dr. Beaumont’s process is cathartic; he lets Nicholas look the demons in the eyes and confront them rather than repress and replace the ugliness of grief with fabricated smiles and happy memories. Grief is a long process, and its resolution comes not in denial but in acceptance.

Situating itself in the intersection of folklore and psychology, The Twin dramatizes the subconscious of a human mind and how it deals with loss. It shows how old stories can shape extreme situations when the mind regresses back into its primary tenets. No matter how we dress grief and loss in modern psychological language, there is an inherent, palpable tendency of the mind to latch onto the symbolism of tales told around the hearth, passed on from grandparents to grandchildren, that lay dormant in the subconscious until it’s time for a theater of complex emotions. 

Folktales are inevitable vessels for humanity’s struggles and existence in the face of adversities, a way for them to reconcile themselves with the truth in the realm of fiction when it seems unbearable to be done in reality. The faceless entity that haunts Nicholas is the formless grief that demanded recognition from him. By remembering Jacob’s face and by painting it to completion, Nicholas reclaims the agency to remember his son. While the grief will remain a part of him for a very long time, the wholeness of memory and the acceptance will resist the grief to stop acting like a destructive double.