An ambiguous movie ending is a tough thing to pull off. Audiences go into a movie with the expectation that all of the plot threads established throughout the runtime will be tied up by the end, and we’ll leave the characters in a good place. If anything is left unresolved, it had better be artful or the audience will be disappointed.
Sometimes, an ambiguous ending can come off like the director couldn’t come up with an ending, so they left the audience to come up with their own ending. Other times, the ambiguity works beautifully.
A Serious Man
The Coen brothers’ A Serious Man is a Biblical story about a Jewish man in the 1960s whose tranquil suburban existence comes crumbling down around him in the space of a week. At the end of that week, and the end of the movie, a giant tornado descends upon the town.
This is right after Larry, the Job-like figure at the movie’s center, has received a call from his doctor, saying he needs to speak to him about his recent chest X-ray as soon as possible.
The Shining
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining has a pretty clear-cut ending. Jack Torrance descends into madness and attempts to murder his wife and son, but they manage to avoid him long enough for him to freeze to death in the snow.
However, this is followed by a shot that slowly closes in on a photograph taken decades before the film took place, in which Jack can be seen partying with some guests at the Overlook. Despite thousands of film buffs’ analysis, no one has made coherent sense of this ending – just like Kubrick wanted.
The French Connection
At the end of William Friedkin’s police thriller The French Connection, Popeye Doyle’s hunt for the elusive Charnier comes to a head. When Doyle finds out he accidentally shot Mulderig, the federal agent he’d been butting heads with, he tells Cloudy that he’s going after Charnier.
He disappears off-screen and we hear a single shot ring out before cutting the black. Captions explain that Charnier was never caught, and Doyle and Cloudy were transferred to another department. It remains unclear what happened with the gunshot.
Blade Runner
Is Rick Deckard a replicant? That’s the question that has tortured sci-fi fans for almost 40 years. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner expertly places the tropes and visual markers of the film noir in a futuristic setting, as Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard is tasked with tracking down androids that have assimilated themselves into human society.
The ending leaves it ambiguous as to whether or not Deckard is an android himself. Denis Villeneuve’s belated sequel, Blade Runner 2049, could’ve provided a definitive answer, but instead, it left Deckard himself as unsure of what he is as we are.
Birdman
Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s dark satire Birdman comes to a head when Riggan Thomson goes out in front of a Broadway audience and shoots himself in the head. Then, in an epilogue, he’s recovering in hospital and being hounded by the press. His performance has been praised and his daughter Sam loves him again. This is similar to the endings of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, in which the lead character meets a grim fate and then all of their dreams come true in an unbelievable finale.
In Birdman’s final moments, Riggan jumps out the window and Sam rushes to see him fall. Then, her eyes drift upwards. Did he actually fly? Or did the whole final scene flash before Riggan’s eyes as he died? Probably the latter, but the movie leaves it unclear.
The Graduate
The Graduate is the story of a kid named Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, who finishes college and has no idea where his life is going to go from there. We’ve all been there. The ending keeps in step with this theme as Benjamin gets the girl, Elaine, and they run away together.
Most Hollywood romances would leave the happy ending there, but The Graduate doesn’t roll the credits until Benjamin and Elaine get onto a bus and ride off into an uncertain future.
Inception
Perhaps the most famous ambiguous ending in recent memory, Christopher Nolan’s Inception ends with Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) arriving home to see his kids. This is all he’s wanted throughout the whole movie. It’s what it’s all been leading towards. He just wanted to make sure he was in the real world before visiting them.
He takes out his totem, a spinning top, just to make sure, and spins it on the table. But then, he walks off to play with his kids before seeing what happens. We see the top begin to topple before cutting to black, so he’s probably safe, but the point is that he stopped caring what plane of reality he was on.
The Italian Job
After a meticulously planned heist goes perfectly and the team makes off with the loot, The Italian Job ends with a literal cliffhanger: the team’s van gets stuck on the edge of a cliff. It teeters back and forth. Their loot is hanging out the back and they’re unable to drive forwards.
Michael Caine’s Croker says, “Hang on a minute, lads, I’ve got a great idea.” But we never get to see what this idea is, or whether or not it was successful. It leaves the audience to come up with their own ideas.
2001: A Space Odyssey
The ending of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is a visual buffet. Dave Bowman is sucked through a void in the depths of outer space and flung “beyond the infinite.” He sees flashing lights and surreal landscapes and bright colors and he ends up in a mysterious, futuristic bedroom.
There’s a Monolith in the middle of the floor, and he sees an older version of himself eating dinner. Then, he goes to bed, ages rapidly, and dies, and he’s reborn as a Star Child. It’s beautifully thought-provoking.
Taxi Driver
If we’re going by the events on-screen, Taxi Driver has a pretty happy ending. Travis Bickle’s bloody rampage through Sport’s brothel allowed Iris to return home to her parents. He recovered from his wounds, and instead of being convicted, he was celebrated as a hero. And he even reconnected with Betsy.
But the thing is, that’s definitely not what happened. The ending is so absurdly idealized – and optimistic, at odds with the tone of the rest of the film – that it’s almost certainly a mirage dreamed up by a delirious Travis as he bled out.