After more than 12 years, fans are still confused over The Wall's ending and overall meaning.
Released in 2012 and directed by Julian Pölsler, this unique German sci-fi drama follows a young woman seemingly trapped in the woods surrounded by a mysterious transparent wall.
The conversation surrounding the film has been reignited recently, as it popped up on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S., allowing international audiences to readily access its mind-bending tale of isolated tragedy.
The Wall Plot Explained
The Wall is a mind-bending and confusing movie packed with hidden meanings from beginning to end.
The movie starts with a woman (played by Martina Gedeck) and her two friends, Hugo and Luise, taking a vacation to the Alps, away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
While this trip starts as planned, things take a turn for the weird as Gedeck's main character, named in the credits as Woman, is left by herself as Hugo and Luise head to the local pub from the cabin the trio have made their home for the weekend.
When she wakes up the next morning, Gedeck's Woman realizes her two friends and travel partners are gone.
Concerned for Hugo and Luise, she heads toward the village to see what happened to them. On her way there, though, she is greeted by a mysterious transparent barrier that blocks her from progressing further.
This inexplicable plane becomes the central plot device of the entire movie.
The woman traverses the wall to see if she can get around it. She stops to find an elderly couple on the other side of the barrier. Calling out to them, the woman realizes it is useless; the two are seemingly frozen in time, and she can do nothing to get through to them.
Heading back to the cabin, the Woman begins to realize the gravity of her situation. She is stuck with nothing but the dog that was left behind at the cabin and her thoughts.
The next day, she tries one more time to escape, taking Hugo's car and attempting to speed through the wall. It ultimately does not work, as the car penetrates the barrier, smashing to bits.
Settling into her new life, living isolated from the rest of the world, the Woman does what she can with the circumstances she was dealt.
This includes taking in a cow to live off of and adopting a stray cat that shows up at her door one morning.
The Woman lives this new life for quite some time. Days turn into weeks, and weeks turn into months.
Stuck within what she presumes to be this dome, the woman experiences an entire summer, fall, winter, and spring, eventually becoming complacent with her predicament and stopping any attempt to escape.
As summer dawns on the spring, the Woman decides to venture out from the cabin into her new life. She takes her cow, canine, and kitty companions and settles in for the summer in a pasture atop one of the Alps' wind-swept peaks.
Life is pretty good in the pasture, but not everything is right. She still thinks about life before the wall from time to time, and if she ventures too far, she is reminded of its confining powers as she bumps into it occasionally.
This is how she lives for another year, heading from the pasture when things start to cool down again, returning to its grass-covered landscape the following spring again, and keeping a diary throughout all of it.
Everything comes to a head the following summer, though. After three years behind the wall, the Woman is thrust into action as she spots the first human she has seen since getting stuck.
One day, living up in the mountains, the Woman hears some sort of frenzy off in the distance and runs. She discovers a man attempting to kill the calf of the cow that had come to the Woman all those years ago.
This sends the dog she has been living with into fight-or-flight mode as the canine rushes toward the man. He is quick to bat the dog away with the axe he is carrying, killing the Woman's furry friend in the process.
With her relatively happy life up in the mountains crumbling around her, the Woman reaches for her rifle and shoots the man, leaving him in a pool of blood on the forest floor.
The movie ends months after the traumatic run-in with the male survivor. It is a cold wintery morning in February, and the Woman leaves one last journal entry before the film cuts to black.
It is unknown what the Woman does after this, but some have speculated with no way of recording what day it is or what is going on in her isolated existence, the character may have taken her life at some point following the film's end.
The Hidden Meaning Behind The Wall
As for what its cryptic plot means, The Wall does a fantastic job of keeping its true intentions hidden from the audience.
Many believe that those inside the wall live in some sort of purgatory. Perhaps the Woman died in her sleep on that first night at the cabin, freezing everything else outside her small bubble (i.e., the elderly couple down the road) in the exact position they were when she passed.
Others have argued that the movie is an expression of gender and how well males and females can live without interference from the outside world.
On one hand, the Woman is noticeably shaken by the circumstances she has fallen into but comes to grips with it and ends up living a pretty fruitful life (all things considered), cultivating her own food and living off the land.
The only man she encounters who is also experiencing the same predicament has been driven seemingly mad with a drive to kill anything he sees (i.e., the baby calf and the dog).
Some have even thought the movie could be about how inessential modern luxuries like electricity, technology, and big-city conveniences are, showing just how easily one can revert to one's hunter-gatherer instincts if needed.
It is one of those movies that is left to interpretation, which makes it all the more powerful. Audiences can draw their own conclusions from its mind-bending plot.
The Wall is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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