Warning: This post contains spoilers for Don’t move

When we first meet Iris (Kelsey Asbille) in Netflix’s new horror film Don’t movenow streaming, she is visibly grieving the death of her young son Mateo, who, we soon learn, slipped off a cliff in a tragic hiking accident. In fact, she is so deep in depression that when she wakes up at the beginning of the film and decides to take a trip to the spot where Mateo fell, she realizes that she is considering subjecting herself to the same fate.

Until a handsome stranger who introduces himself as Richard (Finn Wittrock) shows up and literally throws her off guard. Richard tells Iris a story about how a car accident that killed his school friend Chloe and left him immobile for two months almost left him mentally broken. But he says, “broken doesn’t have to mean hopelessness.”

Unfortunately, when Iris decides to hike down the trail with him, she quickly realizes that his intentions were not pure at all as he insults her, binds her wrists and ankles with cable ties, and kidnaps her. As soon as Iris comes to in the backseat of Richard’s car, the Sam Raimi-produced cat-and-mouse thriller directed by Brian Netto and Adam Schindler introduces its central premise: While she was unconscious, Richard injected Iris with a paralyzing drug Within 20 minutes she will be unable to move or speak.

The next 75 minutes or so play out in relative real time as Iris fights for survival as her body slowly shuts down and eventually stops responding – all while enduring both Richard’s attempts to force her into submission and a host of others faces life-threatening obstacles.

“For me, the film is a conversation with yourself about the will to live,” Asbille told Netflix’s Tudum. “That makes the genre perfect for this kind of exploration. We are able to show their existential paralysis physically, not just metaphorically.”

A double-edged sword with one end

Don’t move It may not be the most groundbreaking serial killer thriller out there, but it does have moments of genuine tension. And when Richard rows Iris, on the verge of regaining mobility, into the middle of a river to drown her, you might just find yourself on the edge of your seat.

At this point we’ve learned a little more about Richard – most notably that Richard has a wife and daughter of his own, and that Chloe’s death has made him realize that he enjoys watching women suffer. He even let Iris in on a little secret: the last thing he said to Chloe in her final moments was, “Thank you.”

But don’t worry, this is ultimately intended to be an uplifting story (at least relatively) and ends with Iris finding the strength to stab Richard through the throat and shoot him before making her way to the shore while covered in bullet holes littered boat sinks into the water. When she sees him bleeding from his wounds on the bank, she only has two words for him: “Thank you.”

Her final message is clearly a dig at him, but also an acknowledgment that he somehow helped her rediscover her resolve in an incredibly twisted way. “I think there is a moment when Iris decides to live and not just survive,” Asbille said. “That’s what touched me, the desperate struggle to overcome something that paralyzed you.”