The Thrilling Ending of Netflix’s 'The Guilty,' Explained

The following story contains spoilers for Netflix's new thriller, The Guilty.

Netflix original movies usually can be sorted into a few different buckets. There's the all-out acton extravaganzas, like Extraction, The Old Guard, Gunpowder Milkshake. There's the awards-season fare, like Mank, Roma, or The Irishman. There are also some comedies, like Always Be My Maybe or Set It Up. But every so often we get a movie that doesn't quite fit into one grouping or another, and that's exactly the case with The Guilty, the minimalist heart-pounding thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal that recently hit the service.

Directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), The Guilty is tense for all 90 minutes of its running time, yet it features exactly zero minutes of actual on-screen action. Instead, we see the station (which does move a bit throughout the film) of LAPD officer Joe Bayler (Gyllenhaal), who in his late-night shift as a 911 operator finds himself in the middle of a twisty and terrifying situation.

This is a movie not anything like any of the movies we mentioned earlier; it's more like the movies Locke (with Tom Hardy) or Buried (with Ryan Reynolds), where the entire movie has one setting, and everything else comes in and out of the context of that setting. For our entire movie, Joe is at his station. He moves from one room to another (to get privacy) at times, but we're along with this character—through his ups and downs—for the whole ride.

And while a couple other actors to appear in the movie (ever-so-briefly), and there are some fun voice acting performances over the phone (like Riley Keough, Ethan Hawke, Peter Sarsgaard, and Paul Dano) The Guilty is the Jake Gyllenhaal show. He's in about 99% of the frames of the movie, and we experience the story through Joe's eyes—with Fuqua making the wise directorial choice to exclude certain details initially.

The absence of those details, combined with the central 911 call at the center of The Guilty, help to make it a movie that has a significant arc and really comes together by the end. And in case you needed a bit of a recap or an understanding of what went down, don't worry—we've got you covered just below.

So what happened at the end of The Guilty?

So while there's a lot going on in The Guilty—shout out to the guy who bruised his knee on his bike and the other guy (voiced, miraculously, by Paul Dano) who got robbed in his car by a sex worker—the two main threads follow the evolving case that Joe finds himself at the center of, and Joe's own case, which we learn about little by little as the film goes on.

First, let's break down the case Joe finds himself immersed in. After we get an idea of what Joe's nights working as a 911 dispatcher are like, he gets a call from a woman who he quickly deduces is unable to speak freely. He deduces that she's in a white van, and starts working all his resources to figure out what's going on. We learn that the woman (Riley Keough) is named Emily, and are led to believe that her ex-husband, Henry Fisher—who has a history of arrests for violent crimes—has abducted her.

As Joe learns more about the case, so do we; he calls Emily's home and finds out that she has two children, a 6-year-old daughter named Abby and an infant son named Oliver. Both are home alone.

The further we see Joe diving in to solve the case and help Emily, the more we learn little by little about his own case. He's separated from his wife, we learn in one call. We also learn early on that Joe is a subject of some public scrutiny or controversy; he gets a call from an L.A. Times reporter, asking for "his side of the story," and has no interest in participating. In a conversation with a police Sargent (Ethan Hawke), we learn that Joe is on 911 dispatch duty because he's been pulled from the streets; his court date is tomorrow.

Eventually, our stories cross over, and it comes after a dark twist. When Joe arranges wellness checks on Emily's kids, the officers find Abby—who Joe spoke with on the phone—to be safe. But they're horrified to learn that the "sleeping" Oliver has actually been mutilated, and is either gravely injured or dead.

Based on the information he had, Joe believes that Henry (Sargaard) is responsible; he gets Henry on the phone for brief moments, but doesn't get anything meaningful out of him. Eventually, Joe guides Emily through a way to escape from Henry's van, and then once she escapes, he tells her to hit him in the head with a brick she found, because he deserves it. She does, and eventually Emily and Joe have a moment to talk to one another.

It's here that we get our big twist—Emily is the one that did whatever was done to Oliver, mentioning "snakes in his stomach," out of nowhere, shocking both Joe and the viewing audience simultaneously, making us rethink everything we've seen and heard to this point. When Joe reconnects with Henry, we learn the truth—Emily had been mentally ill for a long time, but due to cost and low bandwidth, had stopped taking her medication. When things got worse than ever—with mutilating Oliver because of the "snakes"—Henry tried to take her back to a psychiatric facility in San Bernadino. And this is where she called 911 initially.

The stories cross over when Emily, free from the van and now realizing what she's done to Oliver, gets up on top of an overpass, seemingly threatening to jump and "be with Oliver." Joe tries to talk her down, literally, and opens up himself a bit in the process—he's on trial tomorrow because he killed a kid who did not deserve to die. The guilt is clear in Joe's face, but he hopes that he can convince her that there is a path to moving on in life. Despite a fake-out, eventually Emily comes down from the overpass, and Joe is told shortly after that Oliver is alive, in the ICU.

Overwhelmed by the whole situation, Joe breaks down. He calls his former partner, Rick, who was going to lie on his behalf; he tells him to tell the truth. He also calls the L.A. Times reporter back, offering up his story. We hear in a voiceover over the credits that Joe Bayler—a detective on trial for an unjust police killing—has pled guilty to the charges against him.

What did "Snakes in his Stomach" mean?

Again—what makes The Guilty so compelling is the fact that that we're along for the ride with Joe Bayler (Gyllenhaal) for the entire movie. We see things from his perspective; there's no piece of information that we, the audience, have, that he, Joe, does not have. We learn things at the same time.

So when we hear Emily's line about Oliver having "snakes in his stomach," it's extremely jarring, and that's 100% the point. We'd already heard that something bad happened to Oliver, though not exactly what. But we'd heard the concern of the officers on the line.

So, it's a nice bit of disturbing writing when Emily mentions the "snakes in his stomach." That is, of course, not something that someone operating at full capacity would say—and it's clear that something is very, very wrong.

Emily saying that doesn't mean that Oliver was literally having an issue with his stomach, but rather just a glimpse into the possible delusions or hallucinations that Emily was suffering from as a result of stopping her medication, and why Henry felt the need to bring her back to the hospital in San Bernadino.

Like Joe, we had no way of knowing any of this sooner. The moral of the story—well, who knows what the moral of the story is really intended to be. But maybe the truth isn't always what face value wants you to think it is.

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