Mute's Ending Explained

Major spoilers for Mute.

Duncan Jone's Mute is now on Netflix, bringing with it a Blade Runner-esque world with a noticeably down-to-Earth story. The film is a neo-noir mystery (again like Ridley Scott's masterpiece) but told with a major villain twist at its heart and one strange finale. It's sure to cause a lot of debate, so here's our take on Mute's ending.

The main plot of Mute deals with silent bartender Leo (Alexander SkarsgÃ¥rd) looking for his missing girlfriend-with-a-secret, Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh). Their relationship is a touching one despite his inability to speak and technophobia, but alarm bells ring when she's confronted in the club where they both work; this begins to unravel a double life she tries to reveal to Leo - who doesn't want to listen - before she disappears later that night.

What happens next is an unprofessional detective story intersecting with sci-fi The Big Lebowski, and one very surprising turn from Paul Rudd. Let's dive in.

This Page: Mute's Central Mystery And Villain Twist Explained

What Really Happened To Naadirah?

Leo's investigation sees him tracing Naadirah's supposed earlier footsteps, apparently learning of a hidden side-job as a prostitute. However, through a tortured use of technology to track her home, he then learns that it was actually a double, leading to the uncovering of a prostitute ring using girls from the club. This, in turn, helps him discover her mother's address - and the truth.

Naadirah was trying to get her daughter, Josie, back from Cactus Bill (Paul Rudd), an AWOL (and ahole) US soldier and underground medic currently looking for fake papers to get him and his child out of Berlin and back to his homeland. The fence for these documents were the men who accosted Naadirah in the club, and it's that attempt to leave that is at the core of the disappearance; Naadirah didn't want Josie to go. In response, Cactus broke into Leo's flat and drugged the pair, after which he took Naadirah to his house/surgery and killed her by suffocation.

Leo uncovers this with the help of Cactus' partner-in-crime Duck Teddington (Justin Theroux), who is beginning to doubt his friend's sanity (and affronted by a confrontation about his sexual life, a disgusting element we'll return to). He uses Naadirah's phone to send cryptic messages to Leo, providing key stepping stones in his quest.

Mute's Paul Rudd Villain Twist Explained

That Cactus Bill, played by never-aging nice guy Paul Rudd, is actually the villain of Mute comes as quite a shock (not helped by the flashback mechanism used for the reveal being confusingly different to other cases). At first Cactus came across as a light-hearted, relatable character with a wry, word-aware sense of humor. However, his turn - or, rather, underlying evil - was established from very early on.

Duplicity is at the core of Cactus' character. He has clear values that create the illusion of morality, but these are almost exclusively self-centered on his daughter's wellbeing (itself a hint at the murder), with a clear dark side ever present. His career is a shady one, the sadism inherent, and his lifestyle choices questionable (he doesn't worry about taking his daughter to a brothel because he knows and trusts the madam). Indeed, the only reason he confronts Duck on his latent paedophilic tendencies - a perverse bowling joke made real - is because he sees Josie as a victim; once the air is cleared, the pair hug it out. Once the twist is known to the audience, it becomes even more obvious: excessive drinking is a coping mechanism, a jokey act of theft is viewed with critical eyes, and soon the entire facade falls.

Everything is about him and his daughter. After all, that's why he committed the murder in the first place.

Duck's Betrayal Of Cactus

But while Cactus is the perpetrator of the movie's main mystery, his plot resolution is not the end. Once Leo finds Naadirah, the pair battle and Catcus' knife is forced into his own throat.

As the villain lies bleeding out, Duck re-enters the picture. Once the crazier of the pair (since revealed to be of sounder mind compared to the ex-wife killer), Duck has been rather explicitly built up through the film as having a sexual interest in young girls, an unavoidable fact that has forced a wedge between the two amoral surgeons. Duck explains to Cactus how he's not going to help him, then makes him watch him take Josie from her room. Whether his intentions are nefarious are not - there's never any suggestion of action, which may be part of the film's imbalanced exploration of sexual assault - the second knife through his friend's heart is clear.

Yet this aspect doesn't mean the pair's bond is severed, as the ending shows.

Mute's Final Confrontation

All of this builds to Mute's final confrontation between Leo and Duck, two characters who had no prior interaction up until this point. Teddington fixes Leo's voicebox - which was lacerated by a boat motor as a child and left unhealed by his Amish mother - in an attempt to force the bartender to apologize for killing his friend. He repeatedly asks the mute to say he's sorry, even taking him to the location where his cherished photo of Naadirah was taken, but Leo won't - or can't.

And so Duck instead goes for a more permanent atonement: trying to push Leo off the bridge. Yet, at the last minute, Leo grabs Duck and drags the pair of them both into the river. Leo suffocates Duck until the pedophile drowns and rises to the surface to verbally warn Josie not to jump.

Quite what Jones was intending with the film pivoting in this direction isn't exactly clear, but there's something achingly regretful about the pair how've both lost someone finding shared regret before violence emerges. Whatever the case, it's what comes next where real catharsis lies.

Leo's Returning Voice

And, finally, we come to the unmuting. Emerging from the water, Leo calls at Josie to save her from falling. It's only core sci-fi moment in the plot itself (the rest is more trappings, with the main narrative feeling like it would work in any time period) and serves as a key culmination of his arc. As flashbacks point out, the first time we saw him was rising from water having lost his ability to speak, and throughout the movie he was best able to express himself when in a swimming pool, so here we have the mirrored redemption.

The technicalities of Leo regaining his voice are rather simple - Duck fixed him up - and thus explicitly highlight his inherited technophobia; the wounds were able to be healed, yet even after his mother's remit had gone, Leo still held onto it. The entire movie saw him having to use tech - phones, food ordering - but here we have a point where his goal could only be acheived with it. The Amish thread that dominates early in the film is very much in the background, but it comes to the fore here.

The movie ends with him and Josie in a diner quietly drawing ahead of their journey back to her grandmother's home in the city. It's more a coda, giving the two good characters in the story a chance to recognize their similarities - the fact they share a love of drawing is called back to repeatedly with the bear drawing, as is their silence in the face of the crazy world.

Mute has proven a critical punching bag, and a big part of that no doubt lies in how unclear its true purpose is for much of the film, and even after the Cactus reveal how confusing the meshing of its themes remains. It touches on family, religion, technology, sexual fluidity, and has a prominent focus on Cold War politics (the Berlin setting and Cactus being trapped there), but the grand point is murky - as is its genre stylings (none of the story needed the film to be set in the future).

Nevertheless, it must be said there is a depth to its ending, it just comes more from the serene shared moments between its protagonist and other characters, rather than anything larger.

Next: Does Mute Have An End-Credits Scene?

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Source:gamerant.com