Imagine a serial killer on the loose inside your office building; you would want to stick together with your colleagues, right? But not when you’re a horror/thriller movie character. You have no other option but to be dumb (enough to split off from other people) and end up dead. We’re talking about the Australian movie Spithood here, not a single character of which breaks this mold. Not having expected much from it, I was mildly entertained and thought the running length of under one hour was its biggest plus point. In this article, of course, we’re going to talk about Spithood and look into the surprising final twist—although it doesn’t make the movie any better or worse.
Spoilers Ahead
What happens in the movie?Â
At a psychiatric correctional facility that is about to close down, we find the employees—mainly doctors and security personnel—in a pretty chill mood on the final day. Some of them are going to retire, and some of them are going to move onto other jobs. Mason, who works in security, is planning to reveal his relationship with Ashley, who’s a doctor, to their colleagues, although everyone seems to know about them already (and definitely not care about things like HR violations).
The sudden arrival of a new prisoner—Paul Atkins, who has killed at least five women—changes the mood. The staff are obviously surprised, as they didn’t expect anyone new to arrive, given less than twenty-four hours is left for the place to shut down. But apparently, the government has ordered a psychiatric evaluation of this guy to determine whether he is insane or not. It’s a matter of about ten hours, and since the facility is still running, they can’t avoid it. Ashley is the one who has to do the evaluation, and she must follow the guidelines that say the mask of the man is never to be removed – yeah, pretty obvious Silence of the Lambs reference right there and a character even name drops that movie at one point. Not that it matters, as this hardly makes any difference to the actual story.
What did Ashley do?
Let us jump into the matter straightaway. The movie’s best-kept secret is that Paul lost his family—wife and children—in a road accident, where the driver ran off without trying to help. That driver happens to be none other than Ashley. The moment Ashley asks Maisie what she would do if her family were killed by someone and she suddenly got hold of that person, you know something is up. I would give credit to the movie for not doing a ‘final girl’ here with Ashley and taking this path instead. Anyway, Paul is here for revenge—which you realize much later—and he doesn’t take long starting his killing spree. How he got out of confinement is never explained, so we just have to handwave it away. Security guy Noob becomes the first victim while taking a dump and fantasizing about having sex with married women. Next in line is Mel, who’s in charge of CCTV. Paul conveniently spray paints all the cameras before that, so that Mel doesn’t see her doom coming.
Like what I already said, with each passing minute, the characters of Spithood take their collective stupidity a notch higher. It really doesn’t make any sense for Mason to come up with the idea that they should split up in teams of two. The pair of older security guy Jeeves—who really didn’t want to spend his final day at work like this (the man is retiring and very much excited about a future full of endless relaxation)—and young doctor Hickey are the first to come across Paul. Hickey gets murdered while the killer lets Jeeves go for no particular reason, unless you want to consider Paul taking the name of Jesus and the killer being a devoted Christian. That is followed by security personnel Stephanie getting bludgeoned to death with a meat cleaver—not sure how Paul got his hands on one, though, but we can assume it was lying around somewhere in the facility—and the killer aims for her head only. Her partner, doctor Fiona, witnesses the whole thing and makes a run for her life, only to be asphyxiated by Paul with a garbage bag.
What happens to Ashley?
The movie does take time revealing Ashley’s big secret, but you still know that it is always going to come to Paul versus Ashley in the end. Paul has more unfortunate people to kill before that, though. Like so many things this movie doesn’t explain, we never find out how (and also why) Doctor Andy—who seems like a basic nice guy from the beginning—left Ashley and Maisie (an old woman who’s most likely a superintendent of sorts) despite being relatively safe inside Ashley’s chamber. We also don’t know what exactly motivates Andy to lock Jeeves inside a confinement room with patient Clara, which potentially saves them from the killer. Andy dies, of course, and the conclusion here is he was either a selfless hero or just a suicidal person. None of it really matters, as all the deaths are unfortunate consequences of Ashley’s action, and they’re not even aware of it.
Ashley finally confesses everything to Maisie, who understandably gets mad at her for doing such a terrible thing. Maisie rightfully points out that Ashley’s action has cost everyone their lives, and she needs to apologize to everyone’s family. However, in its very final scene, Spithood comes up with a surprising twist—Maisie was actually helping Paul all along. Mason, meanwhile, tries to save Ashley from Paul and loses his life in the process. Paul murders Mason and lets Ashley leave, which is a tit for tat for what she did. Killing Ashley would have robbed her endless suffering after all. Oh, Jeeves also has a heart attack and dies, and his retirement fantasy remains unfulfilled, sadly. There’s one last thing I probably should have mentioned before: the police were contacted by these unfortunate people. They came as well, but thanks to the lockdown protocol of the building, they had to leave without even entering the facility. This is also a very tropey thing—to make the police incompetent, which provides the killer more opportunity to do their thing peacefully, just saying.
