Diksha Sundriyal
In Netflix’s ‘Don’t Move,’ a woman has only a few minutes before she is completely paralyzed and is left at the mercy of a serial killer. The story begins at a state park in California, where Iris goes with the intention of killing herself. She is stopped from falling to her death by a stranger, who identifies himself as Richard and talks with her about grief and loss. In trying to connect with Iris, he tells her his own story about the death of his girlfriend, Chloe, and how that incident changed him forever.
At first, Richard appears to be Iris’ savior, getting her away from the precipice of suicide. However, soon after, it turns out that everything Richard projected about himself was a lie. He is, in fact, a serial killer skilled at manipulating people and their emotions. Telling lies comes naturally to him, which raises a very important question. Was the story about Chloe true at all, or did he just make it up to find common ground with Iris to win her trust? SPOILERS AHEAD
Richard’s Story About Chloe Was Real
One of the things that we find out about Richard over the course is the film is how easily he reads people and tells them what they want to hear. We don’t know how long he has been killing, but he seems pretty adept at seeing the signs in a person and crafting a story to push their buttons exactly how he wants them. He does it with William, making the old man spill the story about his wife, and then uses it against him to eventually kill him. He tries to do the same with a police officer and almost succeeds in manipulating him, too, and this time, he uses Iris’ story about her son to get the sympathy that would make it easier to trust him.
All of his lies over the course of the few hours that we get to know him make it seem that he probably concocted the story about Chloe as well. Or perhaps one of his victims told him the story, and he filed it in to be used in the future. Iris assumes the same, but interestingly, it turns out that not only was the story about Chloe true, but it was also the moment when Richard realized something so drastic that it turned him into a serial killer. This happens after he has killed the cop and enough time has gone by for Iris to get back the ability to speak and do minor movements. She mentions Chloe and the accident as a way to call out Richard’s lie, but what he says next confirms that he hadn’t lied to Iris when he told her about Chloe.
The incident happened years ago when Richard was still in high school. He had a car he loved, and a few weeks before graduation, he was in it with his girlfriend, Chloe. They had been fighting about something, and this continued while they were in the car. The discord between them eventually ended with the car crashing into a brick wall. The crash was devastating. It claimed Chloe’s life and left Richard bedridden for more than two months. It was during this time that he saw the accident and Chloe’s final moments in a completely different light.
The Accident Brought Out the Killer Inside Richard
Richard confesses that even before the accident, he always felt out of place in the world around him. He felt disconnected from things and people, and try as he might, he couldn’t understand the real behind it. But then, the accident happened, and he saw Chloe die right in front of his eyes. Rather than be traumatized about it, the sight of his girlfriend breathing her last made him feel the connection that he’d missed his entire life. This is why he said “thank you” to her as she was dying. It was this moment that he would go back to again and again during the weeks he spent bedridden. He tried to make sense of that feeling he had following the crash, and the more he thought about it, the more it made him feel closer to God. It made him feel like a God, and eventually, he concluded that he needed to feel that again.
Considering that it was in the dying moments of a woman that he’d found the first touch of that feeling, it made sense for Richard to recreate the same thing. This time, however, it didn’t have to be an accident. He could control the whole process and perhaps even prolong it. This led him to start killing women, a process that he perfected over the years. Curiously, he always only killed women, not just because they were easier to abduct and handle, but because he connected the God-like feeling to the dying breaths of a woman, not a man. Over the years, he moved to make a whole ritual out of the thing. Instead of just killing the woman and moving on, he would take his time and spend a whole weekend with her before claiming her life. However, the more he did it, the more he wanted to do it.
By the time he comes around to Iris, he has killed quite a few women with an alarming frequency. It is so alarming, in fact, that his wife has started to notice his curious absences and decided to intervene, though she has no idea what her husband is up to. This shows how desperate he has grown about his subsequent kills and also explains why he’s getting sloppy. He thought he could keep his violent nature at bay by itching the scratch at regular intervals. But his desire to kill has only gotten worse over time, and had Iris not put an end to it, he wouldn’t have stopped to get away for a weekend to get his next kill.
