Yahoo Movies Aftermath ending explained on Netflix
Aftermath ending spoilers follow.
While not a Netflix Original movie, Aftermath ticks a lot of boxes of the type of movie that could be huge on the streaming service.
The thriller stars Twilight's Ashley Greene and X-Men's Shawn Ashmore as Natalie and Kevin, a couple who are trying to salvage their marriage and decide the best way to do it is to move to a new home.
They only know about the home as Kevin is working as a crime-scene cleaner and had recently worked there after a gruesome murder-suicide involving the previous inhabitants. It doesn't sound like a promising beginning to a fresh start and so it quickly proves after Natalie and Kevin move in.
Weird stuff starts happening almost immediately in classic haunted house tropes, like their dog Odi barking at an empty closet and things disappearing and reappearing in a different place.
But who or what is actually haunting the house? We're about to delve into major spoilers about the ending, so look away now if you haven't seen Aftermath yet.
Aftermath ending explained
Aftermath opens by claiming to be inspired by true events, but it's not exactly clear what those true events were and how closely they followed what happened in the movie. It's definitely not a true-crime tale though and is a fictional account.
The bloody opening sees a panicked woman talking to 911 before we hear a gunshot and the camera pans up from her dead body to another corpse missing half of its face, presumably somebody who died by suicide after killing the woman.
We later learn that these two were Erin, who designed the entire house (that's important for later), and her husband Jay. It's Jay's sister Claudia who sells the house to Kevin and Natalie, much to the displeasure of her husband Robert.
It's not just things going bump in the night that happen after the couple move in. They also keep receiving weird mail in their name that they never ordered, like porn magazines, but it seems that there is somebody in the house as Natalie is attacked during the night. Could it be a something though?
When Natalie reports the events to the police, they find nobody on the security footage and Kevin puts it down to a "paranoid hallucination" due to the stress they're both under. However, things start getting more sinister as first Natalie's sister Dani disappears in the house, and then Odi has to be put down after ingesting poison.
To try and get to the bottom of things, Natalie goes to see Claudia to find out what happened to the previous owners. She finds out that Jay and Erin were having marriage troubles as Jay was cheating on Erin with a succession of women, while Erin was getting her own back by having an affair with a mystery man.
Claudia doesn't think her brother killed himself and his wife, but isn't allowed to elaborate as her husband Robert interrupts. As he walks Natalie out, he offers to buy the house back from them at a reduced rate, but she refuses.
Natalie continues to experience weird events in the house and finds photos of her sleeping on her phone, as well as seeing a "rail thin, pale" man in the house. Shortly afterwards, Kevin collapses and doctors discover that nerium, which can be lethal in big doses, was found in his bloodstream.
The police think that Natalie has been slowly poisoning her husband, but when she's attacked by a random stranger who tries to sexually assault her, the truth is revealed.
The stranger came to the house as he saw an advert online where Natalie supposedly spoke of wanting to be attacked. This wasn't Natalie, of course, but Claudia's husband Robert who was also responsible for the weird post. He's severely in debt and needed the house for money, so he was trying to scare them into leaving.
Robert denies attacking Natalie in the night or poisoning Kevin and their dog, and he's telling the truth. When Kevin receives a message from Natalie to stay out for the night, Natalie is attacked again and chained up by the tall, thin man who it turns out has been living in the house the whole time.
It's revealed that he is Erin's lover Otto, who was living in a hidden space behind the closet. Erin designed it to keep her lover around, but when she eventually chose her husband anyway, Otto snapped and killed them both.
His attentions then turned to Natalie when she moved in with Kevin, so he was slowly getting rid of everybody around her, including Dani. When Kevin comes back home, he discovers Dani's body in the bed and is knocked out by Otto.
Natalie manages to escape by breaking her own wrist and, eventually, Natalie and Kevin team up to kill Otto. Unsurprisingly, after everything that happened, they decide to move out of the house.
As we see them move out one month later in the final scene of the movie, the closet door slowly closes, teasing that either Otto isn't as dead as they thought or somebody else has secretly moved in...
Aftermath is available to watch on Netflix.
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