As a writer, I love leaving a movie and thinking, “How the hell did they come up with that?”. But recently, I’ve been noticing a trend in movies, an especially frustrating one, that just leaves me completely disappointed and utterly unimpressed: vagueness. The word vagueness can mean so many things in the context of films, but there’s one thing it can never mean: actually answering questions. Sometimes this is a good thing and leads to people discussing a film for decades to come. Sometimes it can help make a film feel more mysterious and make the audience more uncomfortable. But lately, I’ve just felt it’s the result of lazy writers who couldn’t come up with a conclusion to their own story and decided to leave it to the audience under the guise of “genius symbolism”. In this article, I’m going to dissect what exactly I mean by a “vague ending”, when it works, when it doesn’t, and why the hell they’re so popular in today’s film climate. Oh yeah, there’s going to be spoilers in this article. For your sake, I’ll avoid discussing any films that came out in 2025, but consider anything that came out before this year to be fair game.
What Exactly Is a Vague Ending?
Ready to show the world your story?
Submit your finished screenplay to our upcoming competition and get judged by industry-leading producers.
For this article, I asked some of my friends to give examples of their favorite and least favorite “vague endings” in movies, and their answers surprised me. Not because of what they liked or disliked, but because I didn’t consider many of their answers to fit the definition at all.
For example, one answer that came up multiple times was The Whale. This shocked me because I thought it was pretty obvious that the fat guy dies right before the screen cuts to black. But it was argued to be vague because we don’t really get confirmation of his death. To me, the clear reason for this was that it wouldn’t be very cinematic to show a half-ton Brendan Fraser collapse of a heart attack right before the credits roll. I guess you can call that ending vague, but it never seemed to imply the possibility of him surviving either. The film did just about everything it could to tell us he died without showing us the corpse, so therefore, I do not consider it to fit the criteria. For that reason, I’m going to exclude any films where the ending is pretty much clear despite non-explicit resolutions.
Also, there’s a reason why I’m not using the more popular term of “open endings”. Every vague ending is technically an open ending, but not every open ending is necessarily vague. Movies that end with a surprise cliffhanger or have the characters depart for a new adventure in the final scene are open, but they’re far from vague. Usually, these kinds of movies provided full resolution to their plots and just opened the door at the end to have a little bit of fun, or maybe show that the characters have more things going on in their lives than what we’ve just witnessed on screen. So, this disqualifies films like The Dark Knight Rises and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri from counting as “vague”.
What I’m focusing on here are movies that spend the entire runtime building up to a conclusion of some kind, and then intentionally don’t deliver. This can mean seemingly providing full resolution and then pulling the rug out at the last minute, or it can mean taking the film in an entirely new direction right before the end (and therefore opening an unlimited set of new questions that need to be answered). Or, it can mean simply refusing to answer any questions at all (which is the most commonly seen version). So, in conclusion, whenever I refer to a vague ending, I mean an ending that intentionally leaves the audience without a highly desired resolution.
When it Works
Since I spent the whole beginning of this article complaining, I’m going to pivot to a more positive tone for this section. Vagueness isn’t always bad. In fact, it’s led to some of the most amazing film endings of all time. And that’s the problem. Some films have nailed the vague ending so well that hundreds of movies after them have been trying to recreate the magic, but they just can’t pull it off like the greats. Think back to your first time watching The Thing and how exciting it was to leave that film still unsure of who the alien is. And who can forget the iconic closing image of the top spinning in Inception? But these endings worked because vagueness was a centerpiece to their plots. The whole point of The Thing was that you never really could tell the difference between your friend and the alien’s imitation of your friend. So if the characters or audience could figure out whether MacReady or Childs was the alien, it would kind of defeat the whole point of the movie. The question marks at the end of these films aren’t cop-outs; they’re actually the more creative direction to head in. And that’s why they still get talked about years later.
While films like The Thing, Blade Runner, and Inception are the go-to answers for ambiguous endings, there are also plenty of more contemporary films that nail it. Parasite, for example, has a very poetic ending where the son character narrates his plan to one day buy the home that caused his family so much grief (and save his father in the process). As he does so, the film begins to show scenes of this playing out over the next many years. However, one theme presented throughout the film was the frivolous nature of having a plan at all (because in having a plan, things usually go wrong). If you don’t plan for anything, then you can never fail. Bong Joon-Ho’s decision to depict the son’s plan for the future in actual scenes leaves the audience wondering if he really succeeds in his journey or if it was yet another frivolous plan that’s doomed to fail. Vagueness works in this film for several reasons:
The film still resolved its central plot, so nobody in the audience felt cheated by the end.
The vagueness of the end is actually relevant to the plot as a whole, which means the audience wasn’t blindsided by it and left the theater with a valuable debate over what actually happened.
Without either of these elements, it just screams laziness.
When it Doesn’t Work
Now to the really negative part: when vague endings do not work. There are a million reasons why ambiguity wouldn’t be the best way to end a film, but it’s a case-by-case basis. It really just depends on how the rest of the film was written and whether or not it makes sense to leave the door open at the end. Take a look at Triangle of Sadness, for example. I, unfortunately, did not like this movie (for a lot of reasons), but the primary one was that it didn’t deliver the goods. Every part of this film left me frustrated and unsatisfied, especially the ending. If you don’t remember, the film ends with Yaya (the influencer) and Abigail (the cleaning woman) discovering that the island they’ve been stranded on is actually home to a luxury resort. Abigail had been abusing her survival skills on the island to make herself a queen amongst the other stranded individuals, so this discovery of life on the island would send her right back into a life of servitude. As Yaya approaches the resort to alert the masses of their existence, Abigail picks up a rock and follows her suspiciously. The idea is that we’re supposed to assume that Abigail kills Yaya, and everybody remains stranded on the island, but an implicit ending for a castaway movie just doesn’t work for me.
While I do admit this may sound a little hypocritical, as the same argument I made for The Whale could also be made here, I disagree. A million different things could have occurred after the credits rolled. After spending the past two hours following these characters stranded on an island, I personally felt cheated that I didn’t get to know what happened to them in the end. I understand the point of the movie was to highlight how quickly personalities can change based on current circumstances (it’s a very on-the-nose satire of social hierarchy), so, in a way, the writer already achieved their goal throughout the first two acts. But that doesn’t mean they should get a free pass to not come up with an actual finale in the third (and definitely shouldn’t receive widespread critical praise). There, I feel, lies the issue with many other films that have vague endings nowadays.
Why It’s So Common Now
I believe vague endings are so common today for a multitude of reasons. First, I think the issue lies in the current state of the film industry. Studios are buying sellable concepts more than stories, so people are writing concepts. Instead of prioritizing the production of well-crafted stories that also have a meaningful embedded message, they are prioritizing stories that are the message. Films like Triangle of Sadness, Kinds of Kindness, and Love Lies Bleeding focused so much on their basic premise and symbolism that they completely disregarded their plot as a whole (especially their conclusions). When all you’re worried about is satirizing the social hierarchy or creating a metaphor for personal strength, it becomes more difficult to have your film come to a satisfying conclusion (because, well, you already achieved your goal for the film by the halfway mark). And instead of receiving deserved criticism for this, these films are often praised.
Which brings me to my next point: audiences and critics are too quick to praise heavily metaphorical films. Okay, this next paragraph is going to be a little hard to navigate without me sounding like a complete idiot, but if you have patience and the ability to put your predetermined biases aside for just one second, it’s actually a fair point. Okay, here we go…It feels that ever since Get Out and Hereditary (which both rule, by the way), every single non-blockbuster movie is trying way too hard to have their film be a heavy-handed metaphor for some social issue. It’s not that social issues aren’t important. And obviously most great art that has stood the test of time was created as the result of some personal or social injustice. But what it feels like is happening nowadays is that filmmakers around the world are jumping at the chance to have their great metaphor get turned into a film, and they’re using the historical significance of past films to create a critical barrier. And it’s working. Triangle of Sadness is simply not a great movie. Aside from the acting, there’s not really much reason to think it’s a great movie. But why did it win so many awards and attract so much critical attention when it came out? Well, because of the metaphor. People could go and see it, feel smart for understanding what it’s really trying to say, and then praise it for its cleverness. And whenever you base an entire film around a single clever concept, you end up abandoning the idea of actually trying to write a fleshed-out plot. And when you abandon the idea of writing a fleshed-out plot, it becomes hard to come up with an actual resolution. And that’s when the abrupt, vague, unsatisfying ending comes in. And for some reason, people confuse the prompting of discussion with impressiveness. Just because I left your movie discussing the ending does not mean that the ending was thought-provoking. These writers are usually not geniuses, they’re assholes. And every time the Cannes Film Festival or the Academy Awards rewards films like this, it leads to more and more being made.
Which leads me to my last point: laziness. People are lazy by nature, and writers are no different. So if studios are willing to fund films like this, and critics are willing to praise films like this, then why would a writer hassle over coming up with a legitimate conclusion? They can just cut the film off early or leave the conclusion up for interpretation. If it’s up to the audience to determine the ending, then it can never be bad, right?
Conclusion
I know I may sound very cynical (I am), but I just miss the time when films actually prioritized their stories. Today’s films are so focused on being socially on-the-nose and “elevated” that they usually end up completely ignoring the main reason why so many people go to the movies. And by doing this, they continuously cheat the audience out of any sense of satisfaction. So, whenever you come across a movie that doesn’t have a definite conclusion, you need to ask yourself “Was this the best way to end the film, or did the writer take the easy road out?”
The Script Lab
Get weekly insights on screenwriting craft and industry news delivered to your inbox.
