The Meaning Of Bottom Of The World’s Confusing Ending

What was the meaning behind Bottom Of The World’s cryptic ending? Mystery drama Bottom Of The World is directed by indie filmmaker Richard Sears from a script penned by Brian Gottlieb. The movie stars Jena Malone (The Neon Demon) and Douglas Smith (Big Little Lies) as a young couple called Scarlett and Alex who are on a road trip heading to Los Angeles via Route 66.

When Scarlett falls sick, the couple stops by a motel in a New Mexico town for the night where a whole load of weird stuff starts happening. A strange masked man is stalking the couple and their motel room TV only seems to play evangelical broadcasts hosted by a preacher (Ted Levine, The Silence Of The Lambs). Furthermore, Scarlett gets drunk on tequila and confesses to Alex some awful abuse she subjected her disabled cousin too when she was younger before backtracking completely. When the couple tries to leave the following day, Scarlett is struck by mysterious pains that only abate once they return to the town.

After Scarlett disappears Alex scrambles to find her and has a couple of strange run-ins with the aforementioned masked stalker and the evangelical TV preacher at a church he finds in the desert. That’s when things get really weird with Alex waking up in a seemingly entirely different life in which he’s a married man living in the suburbs. He returns to New Mexico to find nobody at the hotel remembers him or Scarlett and the desert church nowhere to be seen. Even stranger, Scarlett is now his hard-drinking next-door neighbor but has no memory of Alex at all.

Not knowing what’s real and what’s not, Alex breaks into Scarlett’s house and finds photos that suggest what she said previously about her cousin was true. When he’s caught in the act by Scarlett and Ted Levine’s preacher – who appears to be her father in this reality – Alex kidnaps Scarlett and takes her back to the desert to what he has deduced was her childhood home. There Alex confronts her about what she did to her cousin, who it seems he now shares memories with as Scarlett confesses she murdered her cousin and blamed it on an intruder.

Alex whacks Scarlett over the head with a shovel before the scene cuts abruptly to an unconscious Scarlett lying in bed being worked on by paramedics before being pronounced dead from an overdose. A voiceover by Scarlett reading from her suicide letter speaks of being held accountable for her unspeakable actions before the camera pans back to the desert where Alex is burying Scarlett’s body in a shallow grave.

So, what does the ending of Bottom Of The World mean? The movie is one of those deliberately confusing, David Lynch-inspired indies that leaves a lot open to interpretation.  However, the consensus as to Bottom Of The World’s meaning seems to be that the story took place in Scarlett’s mind while she was dying and Alex was a manifestation of the cousin she killed while the events of the film were symbolic of the guilt she felt during her death throes.