Warning: This post contains spoilers for Don’t Move
When we first meet Iris (Kelsey Asbille) in Netflix’s new horror movie Don’t Move, now streaming, she’s visibly grieving the death of her young son Mateo, who we soon learn slipped off a cliff in a tragic hiking accident. In fact, she’s so deep in the throes of depression that when she wakes up at the start of the film and decides to make a trip to the spot where Mateo fell, it’s clear she’s considering subjecting herself to the same fate.
That is, until a handsome stranger who introduces himself as Richard (Finn Wittrock) shows up and quite literally talks her off the ledge. Richard tells Iris a story about how a car accident that killed his grad school girlfriend Chloe and left him immobile for two months nearly broke him mentally. But, he says, “broken doesn’t have to mean hopeless.”
Unfortunately, once Iris decides to hike down the trail with him, she quickly realizes his intentions weren’t at all pure when he tases her, binds her wrists and ankles with zip ties, and kidnaps her. Once Iris comes to in the backseat of Richard’s car, the Sam Raimi-produced cat-and-mouse-thriller, helmed by Brian Netto and Adam Schindler, introduces its central gimmick: while she was unconscious, Richard injected Iris with a paralytic agent that, within 20 minutes, will make it so she’s unable to move or speak.
The next 75-some minutes play out in relative real time as Iris struggles to survive while her body slowly shuts down and ultimately becomes unresponsive—all while she’s up against both Richard’s attempts to corral her into submission and a variety of other life-threatening obstacles.
“To me, the movie is a conversation with herself about the will to live,” Asbille told Netflix’s Tudum. “That’s what makes the genre perfect for this kind of exploration, we are able to show her existential paralysis physically rather than just metaphorically.”
A double-edged sword of an ending
Don’t Move may not be the most groundbreaking serial-killer thriller out there, but it has its moments of genuine suspense. And by the time Richard is rowing Iris, who’s on the verge of regaining mobility, out into the middle of a river to drown her, you may just find yourself on the edge of the seat.
At this point, we’ve learned a bit more about Richard—mainly that Richard has a wife and daughter of his own and that Chloe’s death clued him into the fact that he enjoys watching women suffer. He’s even let Iris in on a little secret, that the last thing he said to Chloe in her final moments was, “Thank you.”
But worry not, this is ultimately intended to be an uplifting story (relatively, at least) and ends with Iris finding the strength to stab Richard through the throat and shoot him before making her way to shore as the bullet hole-ridden boat sinks into the water. When she then finds him bleeding out from his wounds on shore, she only has two words for him: “Thank you.”
Her final message is clearly a full-circle dig at him, but also an acknowledgement that, in an incredibly twisted way, he kind of did help her rediscover her resolve. “I believe there is a moment when Iris chooses to live, not just survive,” Asbille said. “That’s what resonated with me, fighting desperately to overcome something that has left you feeling paralyzed.”
