Death of Me's ending ties up most of the movie's loose ends, but the true fate of its main character remains unexplained. The story follows Christine (Maggie Q) and her husband, Neil Oliver (Luke Hemsworth) as they try to figure out what happened during the previous night of their vacation on a small, idyllic island in Thailand. They wake up hungover and find a video with disturbing clues to the mystery of their lost time. The video shows the couple drinking a cocktail called "corpse oil," and Christine accepting an amulet from a waitress. After they lose their luggage, they get bits and pieces of information about the video and the amulet from the secretive islanders, who seem to be either unable or unwilling to help them get off the island. By the time the movie is over, Maggie solves the mystery — but not without causing more questions to arise and the body count to increase.
Much like Midsommar, The Apostle, Hereditary and many other horror movies with similar elements of human sacrifice, Death of Me revolves around a sacrificial ritual intended to provide long life and prosperity to a secret society. In Death of Me, Christine and her husband are lured into participating in the ritual by an entire island of people. The ritual is a 200-year-old tradition and requires a willing sacrifice, although the sacrificial person doesn't have to believe in the "island magic" in order for it to work. This shares many elements with the basic plot of The Wicker Man, arguably one of the grandparents of modern human sacrifice horror movies, the other grandparent being Shirley Jackson's short story The Lottery.
Throughout the movie, Christine interacts with several islanders, and through them she discovers the plan they have for her and what it means. She learns of the differing levels of belief that the islanders have regarding the island magic. Most of the islanders believe that the magic is real and that they must sacrifice Christine, their chosen one, in order to be saved from an oncoming typhoon. Christine maintains her disbelief right up until the very end when she escapes the island on a motorboat and heads straight into the typhoon, all but ensuring her death.
What Happens To Christine In Death Of Me's Ending
In Death of Me's ending, everything seems to be tied up nice and neat. However, despite how it seems, there are lingering questions about what actually happens to Christine. After she manages to escape the ritual, Christine steals a motorboat and rides off into the oncoming typhoon. She doesn't believe that any of the island's magic is real, and she decides to take her chances against the typhoon rather than being mutilated by the islanders. It seems that the islanders never actually meant to kill her, but instead meant to get her pregnant and sow up her face as a part of the ritual. It seems that their plans were for her to join the stitch-faced people who had kidnapped her earlier. What plans they had for her baby (which is part human, part island) remains unclear, though its birth is likely their ultimate goal.
When Christine is later found by another boat after the storm, she appears to be dead to the man who finds her. He dutifully puts her into a body bag and innocently tosses the amulet in with her. The movie's final frame shows Christine waking up, seemingly alive, inside the body bag. It's not certain that she is actually still alive, since one of the islanders said that she exists on a spiritual plane somewhere between life and death. While Christine seems to be alive at the end, the events on the island did happen, and she is likely to continue suffering the effects of the island's magic, whether she believes in it or not. Although it might seem that she is now trapped in a body bag, it doesn't change the fact that the amulet is keeping her alive.
Because the ritual was not completed at the end, the island is destroyed by the typhoon, which means that the island's magic is real in the movie. However, the ritual sacrifice doesn't only protect the island and its inhabitants from the typhoon. The American woman, played by The Haunting of Bly Manor's Alex Essoe, whom Christine rented the apartment from, claimed to have had cancer before she came to the island. She believes that the island and its ritual made her well again. The ending suggests the ritual has kept the people of the island safe from typhoons, disease and other disasters for hundreds of years. The island magic must be real — and even though the island was destroyed, the magic still exists in some form since it brough Christine back to life.
Death Of Me: The Ending's Real Meaning
The real meaning of Death of Me, both its title and its story, is that there are always some people in any society that are willing to sacrifice themselves or others for the greater good. The movie's title has a double meaning that refers to these two types of sacrifice. The title comes from the phrase "be the death of," which means "cause someone to die" either literally or figuratively. However, the title can also be interpreted as the death of the self or the ego. Every islander who benefits from the island magic must make a choice between these two types of sacrifice, and it seems that they have all chosen to sacrifice Christine and not themselves.
The island is clearly a place where the locals and visitors are healed of their ailments, as Christine and her husband are healed of their infertility, allowing them to become pregnant through magical means. One of the islanders says that everyone on the island came from somewhere else, probably specifically to find this salvation. This clearly comes with a price in human life. In the old days, one islander says, people willingly sacrificed themselves for the island and the greater good that it provided. This selfless act can be seen as a death of the ego, a death of individualism.
In this way, Death of Me's real meaning is not that human sacrifice is evil (which it most often is) or that Christine is an innocent victim (which she definitely is), but instead, that in varying degrees, societies thrive when they contain people either willing to sacrifice themselves or others for the prosperity of the group. Since Christine does seem to be alive at the end, she will ultimately have to make a decision about the sacrifice she herself is willing to make, because she likely is still carrying the island's baby and the amulet, both of which have the potential to continue the island's dark tradition wherever she goes next.