It’s stating the obvious to say that cinematic greatness can only be achieved by maintaining a consistently high level of quality to the first frame to the last, with 2012’s gnarly body horror American Mary shooting itself square in the foot with an ending that went so far off the rails it torpedoed the entire experience for many viewers.
Katharine Isabelle stars as the titular Mary Mason, a medical student who finds herself drawn into the dark and seedy world of underground surgery, which ends up leaving just as much mental damage to her psyche as it does physical damage on her patients in the illicit sphere of body modification.
American Mary is gruesome, gory, and often very squeamish to endure, but it’s nonetheless endured as a cult favorite in the 10 years since first being released. However, a recent Reddit thread has once again dredged up the problems almost everyone seems to have with the closing stretch of the film, which undoes a lot of the heavy lifting done up to that point.
You don’t need to be a detective to infer that the consensus is firmly in agreement that American Mary stutters and stumbles towards the end, with the top-voted comments including such nuggets of truth as the notion “it got a little lost towards the end”, it “sure lost a little direction at the end there”, the “ending felt rushed and unsatisfying”, and quite simply someone who “fell asleep at the end”.
Diving into specifics would constitute spoilers, but American Mary is well worth tracking down if you’ve got a strong stomach and don’t mind an underwhelming climax.