What if you end up shooting someone on accident and then start to receive threatening calls from people who knew them? The feeling of fear of yourself becoming prey by the hands of the loved ones of the one you killed was portrayed perfectly by Sam Rockwell perfectly in the crime-thriller titled A Single Shot.
Directed by David M. Rosenthal, the series takes inspiration from Matthew F. Jones’ novel of the same name. Produced by Aaron L. Gilbert and Chris Coen, the film became widely popular due to the brilliant performance of Sam Rockwell as John. Viewers felt the film had a bleak sense of atmosphere, and the plotline was obvious without any twist.
The supporting cast of A Single Shot consists of William H. Macy playing the role of Pitt, Amy Solan playing the role of Carla, William Earl Brown playing the role of Puffy, Heather Lind playing the role of Mindy, Christine Burke playing the role of Ingrid, Jenica Bergere playing the role of Colette and Lana Giacose playing the role of Angela. The film was first released on September 20, 2013, with a run time of 112 minutes.
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A Single Shot Ending Explained:
The film begins with John’s wife leaving him and taking their son with her. John’s farm got sold after his father died, and the mortgage payment for the farm was stopped. John becomes an emotional wreck and depressed from the ongoing tragedies in his life. John begins to feed himself by hunting deer and starts to live in poverty in the rural region of West Virginia. One day while he is hunting and illegally stalking a deer in Nature Conservancy, he accidentally shoots a young woman.
John panics once he realizes what he did, and he hides the body of the woman in a shipping container. John also finds $100,000 in the abandoned van the young woman was using to hide from someone mysterious. The following day John starts trying to repair his relationship with his wife and to get his child back.
John contacts a local attorney to draft a document to get his wife and child back. John draws the attorney’s attention after he gives him thousands of dollars. The next day John visits the apartment his wife is living in and interrupts the nanny having sex with a convict. John is threatened by a stranger who doesn’t like his glance as he is leaving his wife’s apartment.
Once John returns to his trailer, he finds it has been trashed by someone in order to search for the money John stole from the woman. John refuses his wife from entering the trailer to get her clothes because someone had placed the body of the dead woman on his bed with a note warning him. John threatens the attorney at gunpoint to force him into revealing everything he knows.
A stranger asks the ex-con whether he was able to locate the cash or not. On the refusal of the ex-con, the stranger kills him by slitting his throat. John escapes undetected after the strange man leaves the house of the ex-conman. A girl from the neighborhood takes pity on John and brings him something to eat, and as the duo is eating, the radio in the trailer starts playing. John goes inside his trailer to investigate what is going on, only to return after the girl screams. On his return, he finds the woman is held captive by the same stranger.
How Did John Die?
John is forced to leave his pistol after seeing the friendly woman in danger, and the stranger asks John to bring him the money he stole from the woman. Before John leaves to bring the money, the stranger cuts his index finger and thumb from his right hand. The stranger cut John’s finger to ensure he couldn’t use a weapon. John successfully kills the stranger with the help of a scoop rifle.
Once John successfully returns the friendly woman to town, he returns to his trailer and digs up the body of the woman he accidentally shot hidden in his refrigerator. John drags the woman’s dead body and digs a hole in the ground to bury her. But to his bad luck, he couldn’t get out of the hole himself due to the weakness caused by the blood loss.
John dies after he pulls the body of the dead woman into the hole with himself. The last thing he sees is a deer looking at him. The end message of the film was no wrong deed goes unpunished, as represented by the death of John, who killed a woman and thought he could get away from it. The ending gave a sense of poetic justice as, after everything, John dies from blood loss.
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