The Apology Movie follows Darlene, a recovering alcoholic, as she prepares to host a Christmas party for her loved ones for the first time in a long time. She is shortly interrupted by an unexpected guest at the door, which flips her night upside down. The tension and moral problem that unfolds throughout the rest of the film is what allows the film to get the most juice out of its confined setting.
I think this story is a somewhere of a slow-burn story, but not at the same time. As you just deal with just a lot of different emotions from grief, trauma, anger, and frustration between these characters in here. But I still felt like the story here wasn’t bad. As for the ending to me, it definitely does feel like Justice will get served and now that Darlene now finally knows the truth about what has happened. So let’s recap, do a The Apology Movie Ending Explanation, and break down everything important from the movie.
The Apology Movie Plot
The story takes place around Christmas time, and it focuses on a character by the name of Darlene. Darlene has gone through a lot of depressing things in her life. She is a recovering alcoholic, her daughter has been missing for over 20 years, and this is the first Christmas in a very long time that she is now just, I guess, starting to like to feel like herself again. Because of the cooking that she’s doing and she’s expecting these family members to come by and just celebrate with her.
Everything is good at first until the appearance of her exchange brother, Jack. He comes bearing different gifts and just carries out lots of different secrets with him. Some of the secrets are dark, of course, but the biggest of them all is a pretty dark and depressing secret.
And once the secrets are out, that is when this night becomes from a good night to dark, depressing, and just frustrating to see. As it just turns into like a long, awkward, saddening conversation between Jack and Darlene as Jack reveals the secret.
Throughout the conversation, many times, he definitely manipulates her. He gaslights Darlene and just tries to make it seem as if like this was not supposed to happen, it was an accident, or she wanted this, she wanted that. He is just doing everything in his power to make Darlene, just feel gaslighted. It soon reaches a boiling point, certain things happen, and all hell breaks loose and everything else.
The Apology Movie Ending Explained
When Jack appears to be about to make a bold move on Darlene, she takes advantage of the power outage in her home by attacking him with Sally’s old picture frame and so bringing him under control.
She now asks that he explain everything to her in the correct order. Darlene initially says that she has no intention to take revenge but then admits that she had always planned to torture the cruel guy responsible for stealing her daughter away by shutting him up in her cellar and torturing him to death.
She now puts Jack in her cellar, but instead of beating him, she wants him to tell her the entire incident. She is fully aware that turning Jack over to the officials would be a wise thing to do, but she is also sure that Jack is unlikely to confess to anybody besides her for apparent reasons and will thus escape the acts of his crimes. Now that she has accepted the truth, Darlene is faced with a moral choice of whether to act on her anger and kill the man or to let him live.
Gretchen, who lived next door, came to check on Darlene after hearing many gunshots and discovering the truth. She joins her next-door best friend in her fight against Jack. Gretchen, in fact, is the one who keeps telling Darlene not to kill Jack. Darlene straps Jack tightly to a couch in a corner room while the two listen to the man’s confession.
The man initially fears that his statements could be recorded and can be used as evidence against him, but convinces himself otherwise when Darlene tells him all the phones are turned off.
The Final Twist
Darlene agrees to Jack’s single requirement, which is that he be shot dead once he has admitted everything. Jack then gradually confesses to everything that happened more than twenty years ago and tells in his own sick way why and how he did everything.
Darlene is understandably angry as he finishes telling the horrible event to her. She raises the gun she had taken with her but fires at the walls behind her rather than at Jack. She now shouts in an emotional outburst that her final commitment to killing Jack was a lie, as she owes the monster nothing. The movie’s biggest twist comes at this point when she discloses that she had taped her whole confession on Sally’s cassette recorder. She just used the gun’s last shot to avoid any further issues.
In this way, Darlene indirectly saves Jack’s life by stopping him from killing himself out of remorse. Darlene taped the confession on the same type of cassette which Sally, who enjoyed singing and recorded her own singing, would use in a final poetic scene. Darlene, on the other hand, recognizes that this is the only way for her to bring Jack to Justice.
In the final scene of the film, as light comes, we hear police sirens approaching the house. Jack was going to have to live with his mistakes, his love for Darlene towering over the same uncertainties she had lived with for the past twenty years. With his words on tape and him still bound to the bed, Jack is almost certain to face legal consequences for his crime.
The Apology Movie Review
“The Apology” is a thriller-drama movie that is decent enough for a one-time watch but nothing to remember for long. “The Apology” is good in practically every way and is a pleasing and slightly effective movie.
Now the performance here was pretty good to me. Anna Gunn, as Darlene from Breaking Bad, gives out a good performance with her character. As Darlene is someone that has suffered in her life, her missing daughter is what has caused her the most pain.
All Darlene wants to know was just for her daughter to come back to her or just to find out the truth of what has happened. And she just does a good job when it comes to dealing with her emotions. Just dealing with just all kinds of just different things and just doing what she thinks is right to get revenge, get justice, and just everything in her power to do what she thinks is right.
Linus Roache as Jack, I think his performance here wasn’t bad as he is definitely not a good person. He does everything in his power to manipulate Darlene. He gaslights her a few times, and he just causes us a lot of pain with his dark secrets in here.
Janeane Garofalo as Gretchen. Her performance wasn’t bad also, but I wish that she had been involved in this movie a little bit more. She is in here for like the first five to 10 minutes, and she doesn’t return until the last 35 minutes of this movie.
The performances in here were all pretty good, but yeah, the cinematography was shot well. The story, to me, wasn’t bad, and it was definitely just a dark, depressing night for Darlene. Once secrets are out, guilt and all different emotions come to light work.
I would say what I wanted to see more is I definitely did want to see a little bit more of the Gretchen character. And I definitely want Darlene to just do a lot more damage to Jack than what she did.
Like she does some damage to him, but I wanted her to see to do a lot more damage to him once everything is out in the light works with the secrets. I wanted her to put this man on a well-deserved T-shirt newspaper. But with how the ending implies, we’ll just see.
But I would say that the apology wasn’t a bad movie, in my opinion. I didn’t have a bad time watching it, and I would say my rating for this movie is 3/5 stars.
Also Read: The Truman Show Ending Explained: The Dark Hidden Meaning Behind The Movie
