This article contains details about important characters or plot.

At the start Don’t move, Iris (Kelsey Asbille) has been through hell: the tragic death of her young son and a bout of depression that leads her to a breaking point. But that’s not the end of their story. By the time the credits roll, she has overcome a psychotic killer (Finn Wittrock) who is trapping her in her own body with a paralyzing drug. But in a twisted way, this ordeal teaches Iris a valuable lesson about herself.

“For me, the film is a conversation with yourself about the will to live,” says Asbille Tudum. “That makes the genre perfect for this kind of exploration” – by playing a character who is first trapped in her own grief and then literally injected with a debilitating drug, “we can show her existential paralysis physically” rather than just metaphorically.”

“Kelsey starts the film helpless,” producer Sam Raimi tells Tudum. “She has been through a lot and feels like she has come to the end of her journey. I think by interacting with Finn’s character throughout the film, even though it’s a suspense film, it’s also a character film, and she develops what she had lost – that desire to live.”

It takes a threat to her life in the form of Wittrock’s Richard to reveal the true depth of Iris’s survival instincts. Read on to learn more about how Iris ultimately escapes at the end of the spooky new thriller.

How does Richard paralyze Iris?

He takes a paralyzing drug that takes 20 minutes to take effect and wears off after an hour. Serial killer Richard lures Iris with a counterintuitive strategy: he advises her not to commit suicide while she stands on the edge of the cliff where her son died. “He has to be someone who you accept as a sensitive person, someone who is curious and who will go out and successfully upset someone, literally,” co-director Brian Netto tells Tudum about Wittrock.

But after forming a bond with Iris by revealing his own tragic loss (his high school friend Chloe in a car accident), Richard reveals his true colors. “I think he has human empathy and human feelings,” Wittrock tells Tudum. “He’s just really good at manipulating them too, and he’s a very good actor himself.” And Richard memorably drops his mask, injects Iris with a paralyzing drug and kidnaps her. He plans to take her to his nearby cabin, where he will torture her before eventually dumping her body into a lake.

“(Finn) is perfect for this role because he’s so charming,” says Raimi. “You trust him. Even though people have seen him as a villain, he has the quality of a leading man that makes him great compared to Kelsey.”

But despite this twisted charm, Iris doesn’t take it easy. Before the drug takes effect, she crashes her car, runs away and jumps into a raging river. The river carries them straight into the backyard of an elderly gentleman, Bill (Moray Treadwell). At this point, Iris is completely frozen and can only blink to answer Bill’s questions. “The script describes the stages of paralysis, but there is an emotional experience and an internal struggle that you have to convey, and you are so physically limited,” says Asbille. “That was the challenge and it was fun to figure it out together.”

How does Iris escape the hut?

With Iris paralyzed, the filmmakers faced a self-imposed obstacle. “One of the biggest challenges that I was afraid of was the fact that the script required our actress to remain silent for so many minutes in the film, and I was afraid that our audience would become restless,” says Raimi Tudum. “But (Kelsey) makes her eyes and the subtlest movements of her face so great that it works great.”

Asbille worked with a trainer, Eric Johnson, to master the surprisingly strenuous task of remaining motionless. “Rather than just building muscle, we focused more on endurance to sustain isolated movements, particularly in the film’s more extreme environments,” she says.

Still, the filmmakers relied on Wittrock and Treadwell for the next sequence, in which Richard sneaks into Bill’s cabin and pretends to be Iris’ worried husband looking for her after a car accident. “There’s a big part of this movie where (Kelsey) doesn’t talk and (Finn) has to continue the narrative and move things along,” co-director Adam Schindler tells Tudum. “So it was really important that we found someone who we thought could be engaging enough to be evil, but you kind of like them.”

With Iris hidden behind Bill’s couch, Richard lets the full force of his charm work on Bill and desperately appeals to the widower’s compassion. It almost works until Richard’s phone rings, revealing his original lie (that he had to borrow a phone after losing his in the accident). “I just found it a really big challenge. “How can I really convince this person that my story is true?” says Wittrock. “And he almost gets away with it!”

Instead, Richard overcomes Bill, sets the cabin on fire and almost causes Iris to die. But she finds the strength to pull up the blinds to alert him to her presence and save her life – for now.

What happened to Richard’s girlfriend?

After picking up Iris, Richard receives a surprising call – from his daughter. It’s a scene that immediately attracted Wittrock. “The moment I remember reading the script that said, ‘I have to do this,’ was when he got that phone call from his family at home,” Wittrock says. “Suddenly something has awakened; he completely transforms and suddenly this completely different life has opened up.”

Iris gets stuck with Richard again – and as she regains control of her vocal cords, she begins to sting him by picking at the scab of his girlfriend’s death. In a way it works.

Richard, who has always been an actor, has believed in the truth of his own performance, but Iris makes him break his role. “In his twisted way, he actually respects her and really likes her,” Wittrock says. “It won’t stop him from murdering because that’s what he does, but I think it touches a very vulnerable nerve in him, maybe the last one he has left.”

So Richard reveals the truth behind his sob story. The incident didn’t drive him crazy, he says, but rather helped him find clarity. The last words he said to Chloe? “Thank you very much.” As Richard watched her die, he discovered the murderer within himself.

Directors Netto and Schindler warn the audience not to take Richard’s words at face value. “It’s a kind of messed up therapy session for both of them,” says Schindler. “Whether he tells you the truth or not, there is a spark of truth in what he says.”

Wittrock, for his part, played the scene as if everything he said was true. “He’s trying to recreate that experience, that initial real love that he had and that he lost, and that he’s trying to understand himself,” Wittrock says. “Why did he feel so good in that one dark, dark moment? I think he’s trying to solve that piece of the puzzle when he does this to all these different women.”

Why does Iris thank Richard at the end? Don’t move?

Running out of time before his family arrives, Richard decides to leave the cabin and head straight to the lake, where he drags Iris into a rowboat and prepares her for her own death. At the same time, Iris regains her freedom of movement; In the boat she manages to stab Richard in the face with his own hunting knife And shot him with his own gun. He falls overboard and Iris has to fight her way back to shore as the boat, riddled with bullet holes, sinks.

But when she comes ashore, she experiences a surprise: Richard has also dragged himself out of the lake and is slowly bleeding to death. She leaves him with one final kiss, an echo of the words that marked Richard’s own breakthrough: “Thank you.”

“I think there’s a moment where Iris decides to live and not just survive,” Asbille says of the film’s final moments. “That’s what touched me, the desperate struggle to overcome something that paralyzed you.” By thanking Richard, she acknowledges his role in this development, even if it was granted for murderous motives. She is now finally free from her paralysis – physically and emotionally.

This means that Iris’ “thank you” is much more sincere than it might initially seem. “Kelsey put her heart and soul into the film and really took the journey from someone who was hopeless (to) someone who had hope again,” Raimi says. “I know this because I am very moved at the end of this film. She has a soul and knows how to give insight to the audience.”

Netto and Schindler agree: It is a moment that puts Richard in his place, but also contains a kernel of truth. “It’s a mixed blessing because on one side she’s accusing him of it, but there’s a real realization on her part of, ‘Okay, okay, I owe this man my life because I didn’t want to fight for my life.’ before I met him,” says Netto.

“I literally believe in the phrase, ‘Thank you for inspiring me to live again,'” says Raimi.

Wittrock found the gravity of the moment a challenge. “When you read it as an actor, you think, ‘Okay, we have to earn that ‘thank you.'” It’s a big arc to get to the end, and so in the back of our minds we both thought, “We have to get to the end of that “The film has reached a point where this sentence is credible.”

There is no doubt in their directors’ minds that the couple made it there. “The realization on his face as she returns his words is one of my favorite parts of the film,” adds Schindler. “It’s just like, ‘What? I can’t believe this is happening.’ ”

Don’t move is now streaming on Netflix.