10 Movie Characters You Didn't Realise Secretly Died In Movies

9. Dr. Ryan Stone - Gravity

As relieved as audiences were to see Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) touch back down on terra firma at the end of Alfonso Cuaron's masterful sci-fi film Gravity, not everyone is quite convinced that's actually what happened.

The movie memorably features a sequence where, after Stone makes a failed bid for rescue, she accepts her fate by shutting off her capsule's oxygen supply in an act of suicidal desperation.

But before she succumbs to oxygen deprivation, she witnesses a vision of the dead Lt. Kowalski (George Clooney), who insists she must endure and resume her rescue attempts.

If we accept that everything but the vision of Kowalski is real, then Stone indeed made it back to Earth, but isn't it far more likely that oxygen deprivation killed her before she could get a hallucinogenic pep-talk?

The rest of the movie, miraculous survival and all, is far more likely the final images pulsing through her increasingly oxygen-starved brain as she dies.

That's not to ignore that the first piece of ground Stone sets foot on after returning to "Earth" looks coincidentally, if not suspiciously, like an idyllic afterlife setting, no?