Diksha Sundriyal
In Netflix’s ‘Don’t Move,’ a woman finds herself in a very tricky situation when she is injected with a paralytic while a serial killer chases after her. It is difficult as is to save yourself from a seasoned killer who is adamant about killing you. But with drugs in her system that don’t just slow down a person but render them completely immovable, it becomes a different task altogether. Relying on the help of others doesn’t do much until you can do something yourself, and at the end of the day, the woman realizes that it is she who must herself from what otherwise looks like imminent death at the hands of a ruthless killer. SPOILERS AHEAD
Don’t Move Plot Synopsis
Grieving her son, Mateo, Iris goes to Massey Big Sur State Park to fall to her death from the same point Mateo fell from. As she is about to do it, she is interrupted by Richard, who talks about his own grief of losing a woman named Chloe, whom he loved. The conversation makes Iris give up on suicide, and she walks back to her car with Richard. This is also where he attacks and abducts her. Using the pocketknife she’d carried with her to the park, Iris manages to crash the car and escape. But Richard reveals that he’s already injected her with a paralytic that will kick in 20 minutes, rendering her completely immovable.
Still, Iris doesn’t give up. At first, she finds an old man who can help him, but Richard gets to him. He kills the man and takes Iris back in the car with him. They stop at a gas station, where a boy and his mother notice her, but even as her body starts to work again, she is unable to ask for help. Still, the encounter is weird enough for the woman to call the cops, which leads a cop to them. While Richard goes his usual route of manipulating others into believing his story, the cops catch up to him. However, before he can do anything, Richard attacks and kills him, snuffing out Iris’ hopes of being rescued.
As her senses start to return, Iris starts to think of all the ways that she can turn the situation around. The fact that she can speak now allows her the hope to talk some sense into Richard. At first, she expresses her anger, especially about how he used a fake story to make her tell him about her own grief. However, it turns out that the story about Chloe was real. Richard (which most likely isn’t his real name) really was in an accident with her where she died. It also turns out that watching her in her final moments was the time when things clicked for Richard. He realized that it was this that made him feel closer to God, and he wanted to feel it again and again. This is why he started to kill women. He wanted to recreate the moment that he’d had with Chloe. But that’s not the only thing Iris finds out.
On the way, Richard receives a call, and it turns out to be from his daughter, who seems completely unaware of the fact that her father is a serial killer. She tells him about getting good grades, and as he talks to her on the phone, Iris sees a glimpse of homeliness in him. Over the call, Richard also discovers that his family has decided to show up at the house, where he told them he was going to spend some alone time to work on himself. His wife is concerned that he has been taking off for such alone times more frequently, and she worries that he is dissociating from the family. She thinks it would be a good idea for all of them to spend the weekend together. Before Richard can try to change her mind, he discovers that his wife and daughter have already planned the whole thing and are on their way.
Does Iris Die?
With his family coming around, Richard has no option but to kill Iris now. He cannot take her back and hide her from his family. Moreover, even if he takes her somewhere else and has his way with her, his absence would be questioned by the family, who are already expecting him at the house. In any case, he needs to be there by 10. So, he completely flips his original plan. Instead of the house, he takes Iris to an isolated place. During this time, she tries to use his family as an excuse for him to just let her leave by the side of the road, promising that she will never bother him again because he has no idea who he is anyway. However, he has made up his mind.
Eventually, Iris regains enough control of her body to stab Richard with the syringe that he’d placed on the dashboard and which she had sneaked in when the cop was around. However, she is unable to inject the contents of the syringe, which foils her whole effort. She has yet to get full control of her body, which gives Richard enough time to drag her to the lake, throw her in a boat, and take her out into the water. Iris knows that this is now or never, so she decides to use whatever energy and control she has at the moment. Tied up on one end of the boat, she notices a knife and a gun on Richard. She requests him to give her Mateo’s red boat, which she holds dear and has been carrying since the morning. She says she wants to hold it in her last moments. As expected, Richard relents and approaches to take the boat out of her pocket, during which she steals the knife from him and stabs him through the neck.
It’s the kind of stab wound that a person is not expected to recover from, but Richard is yet to completely die. The stabbing makes him angrier, and he tries to shoot Iris, but she destabilizes the boat, making him fall into the water. When he tries to get back on the boat, she shoots at him four times, out of which two shots hit Richard, while the other two cause holes in the boat. While Richard is gone, Iris is still tied up, which becomes a problem as the boat starts to fill with water and eventually sinks. Iris, too, goes down with the boat, and for a moment, it seems that she will not be able to make it out. However, her drive to stay alive has kicked in, and with the drugs wearing off for good, she is well enough to swim, even with her hands tied up. Slowly, she makes it back to the shore. With no fatal wounds on her body and the effect of the paralytic completely gone, Iris is finally safe. That is until she hears Richard making it to the shore a few moments later.
Is Richard Dead?
Using a paralytic to render his victims completely immovable, giving him the freedom to do whatever he wanted with them, had usually worked out for Richard pretty well. He never had to hurt another soul except his victim, and having had his fill over the weekend, he could go back to his family and rest easy. The morning he abducts Iris, everything seems to be working in his favor. They are in the seclusion of a state park, with no one around for miles. She doesn’t have her phone, which means she cannot be traced and cannot call for help. It makes things quite easy for him. After so many successes, he gets overconfident, which is why he forgets to check Iris’ pockets. Had he done it, he would have found her knife, and all that followed could have been avoided.
One oversight on his part leads Iris to escape, causing even more trouble as he finds help from one person after another, forcing Richard to kill those people and put the law on the lookout for him, especially after he kills the cop. One would think that with the fiasco it caused, Richard would have learned from his mistake, but he ends up making another. When Iris requests him to take her son’s boat out of her pocket, he does as asked. He doesn’t question her motive, nor does he consider the fact that the drugs have started to wear off of her system, and her desire to live has been reignited. He underestimates her, just as he had underestimated her at the beginning of it all, which leads him to get stabbed through the face and then be shot. As the boat sinks, Richard has enough life in him to make it to the shore, but by the time he reaches there, it’s already too late.
He has lost too much blood. Moreover, to dispose of Iris, he drove far into the woods to make sure no one else was around to catch him. This also means that now that he needs help, there is no one around for it, which means that his wounds won’t be treated, and he will die in these woods. Even if he survives, things don’t look any better for him. Because Iris is alive and well, she will reveal everything about him to the cops. The whole story will be corroborated by other witnesses, like the boy and his mother at the gas station and old William’s burned-down house in the woods. The truth about his killings will come out, and soon, his family will find out about it, and they will hate him forever while he rots in prison. Considering all this, bleeding to death seems like a better option for Richard.
Why Does Iris Say “Thank You” to Richard?
At the beginning of the film, when Iris walks out of her home, she seems intent on taking her own life. Since the death of her son, she hasn’t been able to go back to being normal. Apart from the grief, she is also burdened by the guilt of not looking after Mateo and letting him fall to his death. She has had enough and is ready to jump off the rock when Richard shows up. Having a heart-to-heart with him makes her feel better, but not so much that she has completely given up the idea. She has just decided not to do it that day, but then it turns out that Richard has taken it as a sign that he must be the one who gets to kill her.
For the next few hours, as Iris fights for her survival, the need to live kicks into her system. It has been a while since she felt like that, and it is the imminent danger of death that brings that fight back into her system. She could have easily relented to Richard and let him kill her. But the fact that she fights with every fiber of her being to escape him, even when all of her body has shut down, and she cannot move an inch, shows her that there is still much to live for, and she cannot give up just yet. In the end, when she sits by the shore of the river, having saved herself from drowning, she lets the whole experience sink in. Despicable as his actions may have been, if it weren’t for Richard, Iris would have probably died; if not that day, then surely in the near future. This is why, when she stands over him, as he chokes on his own blood, she says “Thank you” to him.
The words reflect what Richard told Iris in the car. When talking to her about Chloe, he reveals that his last words to her were “thank you” because it was her death and his own near-death experience in the accident that led him to feel more alive than ever. It was watching her die that brought him the feeling that nothing else in the world could, and it was this feeling he had chased ever since. So, when Iris says “thank you” to him, it is also her way of throwing those words back at him and mocking him for how spectacularly he has failed with her. It is also a full-circle moment for Richard because as his life ends, Iris knows that she has received another chance and must start anew.
Read More: Is Don’t Move a True Story? Is Richard Based on a Real Serial Killer?
