Netflix’s The Half Of It Ending Explained: Will [SPOILER] Get Together?

The ending of Netflix’s romantic coming-of-age film The Half Of It brings the love triangle between Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis), Paul Munsky (Daniel Diemer), and Aster Flores (Alexxis Lemire) comes to a head – but will any of them end up together? Written and directed by Alice Wu, The Half Of It warns early on that it’s not the kind of love story where anyone gets what they went. However, the ending teases a hopeful future for Ellie and Aster somewhere down the road.

Set in the small town of Squahamish, The Half Of It sees Ellie, who is using her writing skills to pen other students’ essays and make money off them, hired by Paul to write a love letter on his behalf to the beautiful and popular Aster. Little does Paul realize that Ellie is also in love with Aster, and exchanging letters and texts with her only deepens their bond – even if Aster is mistaken about who she’s falling in love with.

Things come to a head when Aster catches Paul trying to kiss Ellie, having developed feelings for her through their growing friendship. Hurt and despondent, Aster is taken by surprise when her boyfriend Trig (Wolfgang Novogratz) proposes to her in church, with Ellie and Paul watching. Though at first she agrees to marry him, the engagement is interrupted when both Paul and Ellie make speeches about what love is, and Aster realizes that Ellie was the author of the letters all along.

Aster & Ellie’s Sexuality: Are They Both Gay?

The Half Of It is based on Wu’s own experiences growing up as a lesbian in the Chinese-American community, and Ellie seems to be closely based on Wu, so it’s safe to assume that she is also a lesbian. She never shows an interest in any of the guys in her school, and immediately recoils when Paul tries to kiss her. Though the final scene of The Half Of It, in which Paul runs after Ellie’s train as she heads off to college, is lifted from a romantic movie that they watched together, Ellie never appears to reciprocate Paul’s short-lived romantic feelings for her. Moreover, Paul comes to accept that if he loves Ellie then he shouldn’t want her to change.

Aster’s sexuality is left a little more ambiguous, since she’s the object of Ellie’s affections rather than the narrator of the story. She definitely appears to be romantically interested in Ellie, as evidenced by the scene in which she invites her out to the hot springs to share an intimate day together in the water. During this scene she even makes the expression that Paul earlier attempted to imitate, when he was telling Ellie how Aster looks when she wants to be kissed. However, Aster’s interest in girls is at odds with her strict Catholic upbringing (Paul, who attends the same church, tells Ellie “it’s a sin” and that she’s going to hell for loving Aster). Because of this, it’s unclear whether Aster dates Trig and Paul because she’s bisexual, or because she feels it’s expected of her – and in fact, Aster herself may still be figuring that out by the end of the movie.

Will Ellie and Aster End Up Together?

Though romantics may be disappointed that Ellie and Aster aren’t girlfriends at the end of The Half Of It, their final conversation lays out the reasons why they can’t be together just yet – while also leaving plenty of hope for the future. Ellie and Aster talk from across different sides of the street, with the line dividing them echoing the ping-pong table that Ellie used earlier in the film to show Paul how conversation should flow. Ellie and Aster pass their own conversation back and forth over the line and spell out exactly what it is that’s dividing them: Ellie has yet to figure out what she believes in, and Aster still has to figure out who she is.

After being challenged by Ellie on her constant uncertainty, Aster retorts, “You watch. In a couple of years I am going to be so sure.” After crossing the line that divides them to give Aster a passionate kiss, Ellie tells her, “I’ll see you in a couple of years.” The clear implication is that they will reunite after Ellie has gone to college and Aster has gone to art school, to see whether their feelings for one another have persisted after they’ve both had time to figure out who they are.

The Half Of It’s Opening Animation & Final Shot

The Half Of It opens with an animation illustrating the Greek myth of soulmates: that humans once had two faces, four arms, and four legs, but were split in half by the gods and left to wander the earth in misery, searching for their other half. There are many callbacks to the mirror image motif throughout the movie: when Ellie and Aster are lying in the pool and their faces are reflected in the water, making them each look like a person with two faces; when they make eye contact in the bathroom mirror; and when they talk to each other from opposite sides of the street.

Muchof the movie is spent in rumination on what exactly love is – whether it’s trying with everything you have for a person, like Paul does with Aster, or whether it’s wanting to live in an ocean of their thoughts, as Ellie puts it. In her speech at the church, Ellie concludes that love isn’t about finding a perfect other half, but about the trying and the searching for that person. She compares it to her and Aster’s earlier discussion about the five bold strokes needed to make a painting great, and says that love is about being bold enough to make those strokes.

The final shot in The Half Of It, in which Ellie looks around at the different people on the train with her, brings the movie full circle. In the train, Ellie sees people who are looking out of the window as if searching for their other half, all of them looking a little sad. As The Half Of It ends with Ellie going on a journey, it implies that finding and falling in love with Aster was not necessarily the end of her search.

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Hannah Shaw-Williams
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Hannah has been with Screen Rant since 2013, covering news, features, movie premieres, Comic-Con and more! You can follow her on Twitter @HSW3K

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