10 Horror Movie Endings No One Understands

What… Was with the giant spider?

Does it have something to do with Jake Gyllenhall’s Dostoyevsky-esque double, or is it… Just a giant spider, or what’s happening here?

Okay, so anyone watching Blade Runner 2049 director/ Dune reviver Dennis Villeneuve’s strange psychological thriller is likely to end up understandably lost by its bizarre ending. An unfaithful Jake Gyllenhall returns home from obsessing over his apparent double only to find his wife has turned into a massive tarantula, an incident which doesn't even appear to faze him.

However, some critics have interpreted the recurring spider motifs throughout the film as a stand-in for women. Like the spiders they are often interchanged with, women are often a subject of fear in this film (what if this one seduces him? What if his wife finds out?).

However, much like the aforementioned spiders, whilst the outsized fear of these women looms large in the narrative, they are actually being victimised more often than they are the perpetrators of evil, as epitomised in the scene where a tarantula is skewered beneath a dancer’s heels. Gyllenhall's anti-hero may seem afraid of exposure, but the giant spider's furtive fear when he returns home makes it clear who has the power and who lives their life in fear.