Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Muted’ follows the convoluted story of a psychiatrist who becomes obsessed with an ex-convict, trying to solve the mystery behind why he killed his parents. Over six episodes, we follow a cat-and-mouse chase where the psychiatrist, Ana, spends her days spying on Sergio, hoping to get an insight into his fractured psyche. She ends up uncovering some dark secrets about his family, and her own secrets are revealed in the process. The story takes such a tragic turn by the end that it becomes difficult to find a difference between the hunter and the hunted. The last scene brings the story to a shocking end. Here’s what it means. SPOILERS AHEAD
Muted Plot Synopsis
Sergio Ciscar’s parents are brutally killed, and he is the obvious suspect. When taken into custody, Sergio refuses to talk about what happened that night. He doesn’t even speak to his lawyer and accepts the sentence given to him. He is underage then, so he doesn’t go to prison. He is allowed to leave the reform center eight years later. By now, he has kept quiet, sparking the curiosity of a psychiatrist, Ana. She wants to study Sergio and gets permission to spy on him by infesting his house with cameras and monitoring him 24/7.
As new evidence comes to light, Ana discovers that the true picture of Sergio and his family never came out. What starts as the project to decide whether or not he is a psychopath soon gets twisted into something stranger as Ana becomes so obsessed with Sergio that she ignores her family. She starts to sympathize with Sergio and believes that he might have been the real victim in this case. She believes Sergio is not the monster everyone is making him out to be, and the truth needs to come out.
Muted Ending: Did Sergio Kill His Parents?
In the beginning, there is no doubt that Sergio killed his parents. He was known to have been a disruptive child with a bad temper, and the brutality of the murder paints a terrible picture, which he doesn’t argue against. The cops recreate the scene based on the evidence in front of Sergio, and on getting no response from him, they believe it to be the correct version of how the events transpired that night. However, Ana Dussuel is more interested in why the murders happened. Why did Sergio turn so violent towards his parents? Slowly, she starts to believe that he might not have murdered them at all.
As soon as Sergio is released, he first tries to contact his sister, Noa. She was the only one that he really cared about. Despite his efforts, he cannot find her because Noa was adopted by someone else after Sergio was arrested. In the final episode, Sergio makes a trade with his aunt. After his parent’s death, he inherited everything from them, which included parts of his grandparents’ property. His aunt never liked him, and she only cared about money. So, Sergio offers her his share in his grandparents’ inheritance in exchange for Noa’s number.
When Sergio calls her, Noa’s adoptive mother picks up the phone. It turns out that Ana was the one who adopted Noa, suggesting that her obsession with Sergio goes way back to the point when he was arrested. She wants Sergio to meet Noa, but before that, she wants to know what he wants from his sister. Ana wants to be sure that Sergio will not hurt Noa, so she demands the truth from him. What happened on the night of the murders?
By now, Ana’d discovered that Sergio’s mother, Blanca, had been medicating him to maintain his temper. The videos and other evidence showed that Blanca had been torturing her son, turning him into a guinea pig for experimenting with her medications. Sergio tells Ana that her mother crossed the line when she started medicating Noa. When his father found out about it, he confronted Blanca, and their argument ended with his father throwing Blanca out of the window. He was so shocked and distraught at his actions that he jumped out of the window too.
This validates Ana’s theory that Sergio is not a psychopath and a killer. But then, Noa shows up and reveals that Sergio has been lying. In fact, Blanca hadn’t been torturing Sergio. She really was trying to help him. Sergio had a brilliant mind, but he also had self-control issues. He would fly into a rage and threaten those around him. Being a psychiatrist, Blanca took it upon herself to treat her son. She started to see some differences, but one day, Sergio didn’t take his meds and lost his temper.
Sergio accused his mother of medicating Noa. It wasn’t true at all. Blanca loved Noa, and she did not need to medicate her daughter. However, being monitored all the time in his own home and his already deteriorating mental health convinced Sergio that his mother was a villain and would hurt his sister just like she was hurting him. Because he hadn’t taken his meds, his rage flew out of control, and things unfolded just as the cops had predicted. Sergio attacked his mother until she fell out of the balcony. When his father confronted him, Sergio threw him off the balcony too. And Noa witnessed all of this.
Who Fell From the Balcony, Sergio or Ana?
When Noa calls out Sergio on his lies, she does it to protect her mother, Ana. Ana had been Blanca’s student, which is how she got to know Sergio. When Blanca and her husband were killed, Ana was brought to psychoanalyze Sergio. While the rest of the world saw him as a monster, Ana saw a helpless, misunderstood teenager. She related to him because she felt helpless and misunderstood growing up. Her mother never treated her well, so when Ana found out that Blanca had been mediating Sergio against his will, she found common ground.
Ana wanted to understand Sergio because she thought it would help her understand herself. She thought they were kindred souls, and she wanted to befriend him. For this, she sends him letters by another name when he is in jail. However, he doesn’t respond to them. When she discovers that Noa has been put up for adoption, Ana, who’d previously had miscarriages, forces her husband into adopting Noa.
Ana knew that even if Sergio didn’t reply to her letters, he would want to find Noa when he got out, and that was her chance to connect with him. When she is allowed to keep an eye on Noa after his release, she jumps into the project with a biased mind. It was never about proving he was a psychopath. It was about Ana trying to find a connection with him. Over time, she finds out about his mother and other things and twists these revelations to support her theory that Sergio is the real victim.
In the end, when Noa tells her the truth about who Sergio really is, she hopes that Ana will let go of her obsession and come back home. However, Ana chooses to stay with Sergio because, by now, she is in too deep. She has tethered herself to Sergio so tightly that she has lost everything else. Her marriage is over, her daughter doesn’t love her, and Ana isn’t sure if she loves her daughter as much as she’d imagined. Her colleagues scorn her, leaving no one who truly understands her except Sergio.
In the final scene, we see her and Sergio walking over to the balcony. Later, a grainy image shows one person falling from the balcony while the other looks on. It isn’t clear who pushed whom. Did Ana push Sergio, or did he push her off the balcony? Who died, and who survived? Because it was Sergio who intimated moving to the balcony, there is a chance that he is the one who pushed Ana. All he wanted was to be with his sister, Noa, but she was deliberately kept from him. He may blame Ana for this. When Noa rejects him, he feels that there is nothing else left in his life, and it’s all because of Ana.
Recreating his previous crime, Sergio takes Ana to the balcony and pushes her off it. He knows that this will land him back in jail, and this time, he might not be able to come out at all. However, he seems to have accepted his fate because there is nothing for him outside the prison now. His parents are gone, his sister sees him as a murderer, and even Marta doesn’t want to be with him anymore. He hates Ana for spying on him all this time, just like his mother did. So, he kills her, just like he killed his mother.
Another possibility is that Ana pushes Sergio off the balcony. Sergio went to the balcony first and invited Ana to join him. As stated, he had nothing left in his life. Whatever delusion he had about his mother endangering his sister is broken, and Sergio realizes that he really is a monster. He doesn’t want to live anymore, so he jumps off the cliff. Perhaps, he sees a kindred spirit in Ana and wants her to join him because he doesn’t want to die alone. Or maybe, he wants her to push him because he can’t make himself jump.
It is also possible that Ana realizes the error of her ways. After the truth comes out, she finally sees Sergio for the murderer he is and accepts that she had been wrong about him this whole time. However, that doesn’t change the fact that she still feels connected to him. Now that she knows he killed his parents, Ana worries that Sergio might come after Noa someday. There is no way of knowing how he will react when his rage blinds him, which could end badly for others. So, she pushes Sergio off the balcony, ending his story once and for all. She knows she’ll go to prison for this, but she has nothing left to go back to, so she’ll accept her fate.
It is difficult to pinpoint which one of these possibilities holds more weight. No matter how much we squint at the screen, we cannot know who fell from the balcony. And that is a deliberate move. At the story’s beginning, Ana and Sergio are two different people. They were practically each other’s enemies on different sides of the law. However, through the episodes, Ana’s obsession comes to light, and by the final episode, we discover how similar she feels to him.
In a way, Ana becomes one with Sergio, even if she hadn’t been like him at the beginning of her obsession. She completely loses her sense of self, so much so that she refuses her daughter’s pleas to join her. For Ana, the lines start to blur as she forgets and loses herself to Sergio. The uncertainty of the final scene shows that Ana and Sergio are not very different from each other. Ana’s obsession has led them to become the same person, so we cannot distinguish between them. Ana has become the very thing she had been chasing after all this time, so it doesn’t matter whether she fell from the balcony. Life as she knew it was over for her either way.
Read More: Where is Netflix’s Muted Filmed?
