COBWEB (2023) Ending Explained
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 - How's it going, everybody?
00:00 Welcome to FoundFlicks.
00:01 On this inning Explained, we're looking at Cobweb,
00:04 where horror strikes when a young boy, Peter,
00:06 tries to investigate strange knocking noises
00:08 coming from inside the walls of his house
00:11 and a dark secret that his sinister parents
00:13 kept hidden from him.
00:14 This story leads us down one direction
00:16 before completely changing things
00:18 with a massive left-field twist
00:20 that is more than a little bit bonkers.
00:22 And the ending ending gives us another confusing,
00:25 abrupt conclusion with more questions than answers.
00:28 So we'll be explaining everything that happens,
00:30 including the big twist and the ending.
00:33 This is one that I was excited about
00:34 for a variety of reasons.
00:36 Probably first and foremost are Lizzie Kaplan and Tony Starr
00:39 playing the deranged parents.
00:41 They both excel in such slightly unhinged roles
00:43 and thusly I was excited to see them do their thing here.
00:46 Then we have this also being the feature film debut
00:49 of Samuel Bodine,
00:50 behind the short-lived but excellent series, "Mary Ann."
00:52 Even the script was given much hype,
00:54 appearing on the blacklist,
00:56 a list of the best unproduced screenplays of the year
00:58 and the blood list, the same thing but for horror scripts.
01:01 They got it all, right?
01:02 What could possibly go wrong?
01:05 Well, surprisingly enough,
01:07 the major culprit here is the script itself.
01:10 Also worth mentioning,
01:11 the dude's only produced screenplay before this
01:13 is last year's Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
01:15 Yeah, that was terrible.
01:17 Outside of that bus massacre scene, of course.
01:19 As for "Cobweb," it mostly plods along
01:22 towards a somewhat interesting
01:23 but ultimately rehashed feeling premise.
01:25 Are Peter's parents really bad
01:27 or what is really going on here?
01:29 The more the secret spill out,
01:30 the more likely it is that they are up to no good.
01:33 Huh, "Homelander" and the lady who played young Annie Wilkes?
01:36 Who could have seen it coming, right?
01:38 They're completely nuts.
01:39 However, that's all just a huge misdirect
01:41 as late in the runtime,
01:42 that whole idea is thrown right out of the window
01:44 in favor of something much more ridiculous and over the top.
01:47 Look, I got no problem with going bananas
01:50 but it really bugs me when the twist doesn't work
01:53 with the story up to that point.
01:54 I also get that a lot of people
01:56 don't actually care about that
01:57 and that brought to mind "Barbarian" but also "Malignant."
02:00 You know, you kind of just have to go with it
02:01 and don't ask any questions kind of thing.
02:03 So if those aforementioned are your cup of tea,
02:05 then this hodgepodge of madness will be mighty appealing.
02:08 It's really not bad, but the twist and the ending
02:11 kind of undo the whole thing for me at least.
02:14 So let's check out "Cobweb," breaking down the story,
02:16 the big twist, as well as explaining the ending
02:18 and what it means.
02:19 We are quickly thrust into the admittedly
02:21 quite insulated world of eight-year-old Peter
02:23 and his parents, Mark and Carol,
02:25 one week prior to Halloween.
02:26 His parents are way overprotective
02:28 and this perhaps is why Peter is so closed off
02:31 and unable to make friends at school.
02:33 His parents do seem normal enough initially,
02:35 yet there is definitely an odd feeling in the air about them
02:38 as though something is just off about the whole setup here.
02:42 Sure, they are overbearing, but they also don't really seem
02:45 to invest much time in the kid.
02:46 Plus the house is just straight up strange.
02:49 At first I was like, is this in the 70s or something?
02:51 They got no TVs in any rooms or cell phones or anything.
02:54 Only later do we see someone with a modern phone
02:56 and that honestly makes it even more bizarre.
02:59 At least get the kid a Switch or something, you know,
03:00 instead of making him just chill
03:02 in his weird hot air balloon wallpaper room
03:04 all day and night, no wonder he's depressed.
03:06 Going to school isn't much help either
03:07 and Peter is seen quiet and lonely,
03:09 not interacting with the other kids.
03:11 Well, except for one douche bully Brian
03:13 who picks on this sullen lad on the regular.
03:15 As in bullying is his only real social interaction.
03:18 Good times.
03:19 Brian reminds him that recess is coming soon,
03:22 indicating it's time for another beat down.
03:24 Peter elects to stay behind and get some sympathy
03:26 from the kindhearted new substitute teacher, Miss Divine.
03:29 His little world is blown wide open one night.
03:32 While fast asleep, there are noises heard coming
03:34 from within the walls.
03:35 He tries to brush it off, but the sounds continue,
03:37 sounding distinctly like knocking.
03:39 He gives it a try, wrapping up on the wall
03:41 and shockingly gets a reply from within.
03:43 He runs to wake his parents, but Carol assures him
03:46 that it's just his big old imagination playing tricks on him.
03:48 I don't hear anything, do you?
03:51 See, it's all in your head, you crazy.
03:53 To his dismay, the sounds return the next night
03:55 and now he even hears a voice asking for help.
03:58 This time his dear old dad steps in to check things out
04:01 and sternly tells him to quit horsing around
04:03 with this ridiculous noise in the wall stuff.
04:06 It really doesn't seem to be in his head
04:07 as the voice keeps coming back
04:09 and they advance to having full-fledged conversations,
04:11 learning that her name is Sarah.
04:13 When it comes to how she wound up trapped here,
04:15 it was none other than his parents responsible,
04:18 declaring that they are evil people.
04:20 The bizarre new secret friendship takes over Peter's life,
04:22 spilling over into school.
04:24 Miss Divine discovers a drawing of his, all black,
04:26 with a voice screaming for help
04:28 along with a frightened Peter in bed.
04:30 Concerned over possible domestic violence,
04:32 Miss Divine visits the boy's home and meets Carol.
04:35 She shows off the drawing
04:36 and inquires about how the boy is doing.
04:38 Carol is cagey, yet insists that he's fine,
04:40 but Miss Divine isn't quite convinced.
04:42 Carol confronts her son about the drawing,
04:44 scolding him for bringing his supposed nonsense
04:46 into the eye of public scrutiny.
04:48 In particular, she takes issue
04:49 with depicting someone asking for help.
04:51 There's no one in danger here, right?
04:53 Peter is starting to doubt that
04:54 and Sarah continues feeding him more damning evidence
04:57 about his dodgy parents.
04:59 They did mention earlier about a girl
05:00 who went mysteriously missing on Halloween several years ago
05:03 and it's due to this
05:04 that they will not allow Peter to go trick-or-treating.
05:07 There is more to the story, it turns out,
05:09 as according to Sarah, they actually killed the girl
05:12 and have her buried in the pumpkin patch out back.
05:14 It might sound outlandish, but Peter has to see for himself.
05:17 Indeed, after a few minutes of dicking,
05:19 he unearths a human skull,
05:20 nearly getting caught by his mother.
05:22 His home life grows more difficult
05:23 and school provides him with no solace either.
05:26 Brian escalates their feud
05:27 by destroying his prize-winning pumpkin, Herman,
05:29 shattering it to the playground floor.
05:31 Since his parents are of no help whatsoever,
05:33 he relays to his new pal in the wall about what happened
05:36 and she has some strong advice of what to do.
05:39 In life, you have to stand up for yourself.
05:41 Don't let that Brian nerd push you around.
05:43 At school the next day, Brian's mother forces him
05:45 to bring an apology pumpkin to make up
05:47 for trashing the earlier one.
05:49 But Peter won't allow this to go on any longer.
05:52 With Sarah's words echoing in his head,
05:54 Peter purposefully struts up to Brian with his pals
05:56 and promptly pushes him right down the stairs.
05:58 And the kid ends up breaking his leg.
06:00 Might have taken things a bit too far there, Peter.
06:02 He could have actually killed Brian after all.
06:04 - Yes.
06:05 - He gets expelled from school
06:06 and his parents are none too pleased,
06:08 revealing an even deeper layer
06:09 to their darkness than before.
06:10 His dad scowls that they don't solve problems
06:12 with violence in this family
06:14 and he moves the fridge revealing a door behind it
06:16 boasting a heavy lock.
06:18 They toss him down into the basement and lock the door,
06:20 certain that this is for his own good.
06:22 Better straighten up and learn your lesson.
06:24 Also down in the cellar,
06:25 there are several pillows and blankets
06:27 implying that he is not their first captive.
06:30 Perhaps even more alarming is another even deeper pit
06:33 covered with a grate,
06:33 leading to another chamber even deeper below.
06:36 None of what's going on at this point
06:37 really helps paint the parents
06:39 in an innocent light, obviously.
06:40 I mean, you don't build that shit
06:41 unless there's a good, well, you know, bad reason.
06:44 Learning he was kicked out of school,
06:45 Miss Devine is even more worried about the boy
06:47 and pays another visit under the ruse
06:49 of bringing him his last math test,
06:50 covertly also including her personal number.
06:53 This time Mark is home as well
06:54 and invites her inside with an eerie smile.
06:57 Little Pika Homelander there.
06:58 Things are instantly quite tense
07:00 based on what we have heard about the parents
07:01 as well as Mark white knuckling a hammer the entire time.
07:04 After a terse conversation regarding Peter,
07:06 Miss Devine notices a nasty gash on Mark's arm.
07:09 He dismisses it as being from doing some remodeling,
07:12 but it is long and deep,
07:14 as though he was fighting someone.
07:17 She thinks this is a great time to peace out
07:19 and collects herself to the car.
07:21 Moments later, Mark appears,
07:22 scaring the bejesus out of her,
07:24 but he still maintains the nice
07:25 but also slightly sinister image with her.
07:27 Like, I don't wanna have to hurt you,
07:29 but I will if I have to,
07:30 so don't show your face around here no more, lady.
07:33 Turn it, what is that, Jersey or something?
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08:40 After an indeterminate period,
08:42 Peter has served his time and is light out of his cell.
08:44 To celebrate, his mom bakes him some cupcakes,
08:46 most of which are smiley-faced,
08:48 but you also can't help but notice
08:49 a few frownies in the bunch.
08:51 Kinda weird?
08:52 Also, I'm not sure I'd be too happy
08:53 with the gesture if I was Peter.
08:55 He knows at this point he's gotta say
08:56 what they want to hear,
08:58 and promises that he's done
08:59 with all the tomfoolery for good.
09:02 Yeah, your parents kidnapping you
09:03 will definitely keep you in line.
09:05 It's hardcore parenting right there.
09:06 Despite what he told his parents,
09:08 as soon as Peter is back in his room,
09:09 he tries to reconnect with his pal in the wall.
09:11 She wasn't killed, as he feared at least,
09:13 but there is even more that she spills
09:15 regarding the parents' sordid history.
09:16 She reveals that she is, in fact, his older sister.
09:19 When she was born, her parents didn't want her,
09:21 and thusly caged her up out of sight for life.
09:24 There's even more pressing matters,
09:26 as according to her, they are running out of time.
09:28 Soon the parents are gonna kill her,
09:30 and Peter will take her place in the walls.
09:32 Well, in that case, it's either him or his parents.
09:35 What to do?
09:36 The family all sit down to a nice silent dinner
09:38 of some quite unpleasant looking sludgy soup.
09:41 Slurping it down, Mark notices something different.
09:43 Did she switch up the recipe or something?
09:45 She takes some curious spoonfuls
09:47 to figure out the mystery ingredient.
09:48 Also noticing that Peter is suspiciously
09:50 not eating his helping, Mark gives it a big old whiff
09:53 and determines it to be cinnamon.
09:55 Not exactly cinnamon, though.
09:57 Earlier they were dealing with pumpkin rot,
09:58 and there was some rat poison
10:00 with a sweet, sweet cinnamony smell.
10:02 That's right, the boy has poisoned them good.
10:05 Upon the realization, Mark goes ballistic,
10:07 lunging at his son in unbridled anger.
10:09 He's soon stopped in his tracks
10:10 by the poison filling his system, liquefying his organs.
10:13 He pukes out an excess of blood on the table
10:15 until abruptly collapsing dead.
10:17 Carol then unleashes her own deep-seated anger
10:19 upon the lad, chasing him through the house with a knife.
10:21 She soon hacks up her guts as well,
10:22 but explodes in a final flurry up the stairs.
10:25 Once she reaches the top, Peter shoves her back down,
10:27 sending her tumbling down the staircase,
10:30 snapping her neck along the way.
10:31 You're like, well, she's dead.
10:32 But to make extra sure,
10:34 she has also accidentally stabbed herself in the gut.
10:36 Whoopsies!
10:37 Peter goes to her to retrieve the key ring,
10:39 and Carol grumbles out a final warning.
10:41 Don't let her out.
10:43 He does so anyway, accessing another secret door
10:45 behind a grandfather clock.
10:46 And yep, it is a tiny door!
10:49 If you've watched the channel long enough,
10:50 you know that's never a good sign.
10:52 Nothing good on the other side of a tiny door ever.
10:55 It really slowly creaks open, seeing only darkness within.
10:58 Sarah finally emerges from the hole.
11:00 Well, mostly her hair, which is really long.
11:03 Guess she didn't get it cut in like 30 years or something.
11:05 Looking like a scraggly ass Rapunzel over here.
11:07 We only get brief glimpses of her in the trailer,
11:09 but so here's an idea of what it kinda looks like,
11:12 you know, based on my own artistic interpretation.
11:14 I might say she resembles something like a cross
11:17 between Momo, but with the long face covering hair
11:20 of Sadako or Samara.
11:22 Yeah, that's about right.
11:24 Looks good.
11:25 Her visage is bizarrely monstrous,
11:26 with huge eyes and an overly large mouth,
11:28 with rows of giant razor sharp teeth.
11:31 Yeah.
11:32 At this point, I was like, hold on a minute.
11:34 What the hell is going on here?
11:36 Because that is just some kind of straight up monster,
11:38 not some normal kid.
11:39 Just getting started there, honestly.
11:41 She then divulges to poor Peter what is really going on,
11:44 and how she manipulated him the entire time.
11:46 As soon as she was born, Carol and Mark
11:48 were so horrified by her appearance,
11:50 that they felt that all that they could do
11:52 was lock her up to keep her out of the view
11:53 of the world's eye.
11:55 "Daddy built me a prison to hold me," she recounts.
11:57 "And when that didn't work, he built me a pit."
12:00 Doesn't seem like that works well either,
12:01 since she was wandering all around
12:02 the crawl spaces and everything.
12:04 She is understandably upset at her situation,
12:06 and wanted revenge against the parents
12:07 who treated her like a monster.
12:09 She was also super jealous of Peter.
12:11 He got to have a bed and do stuff,
12:13 and have a super cool life, unlike her
12:15 living with the cobwebs and the spiders within the walls.
12:18 So all this was really to get back at the family
12:21 that wronged her for all these years.
12:23 She's been waiting until he was old enough to strike.
12:26 Now you might think that living in the walls all this time
12:28 might have left Sarah feeble and malnourished,
12:30 but you couldn't be more wrong, bucko!
12:33 As she says, since she was on her own,
12:35 it was up to her to teach herself
12:36 all kinds of useful skills, like, you know, biting,
12:39 and crawling over the walls like a fricking spider.
12:42 Yes, she apparently is a super powered monster
12:44 with spider-like abilities.
12:45 She can scale walls, crawl on the ceilings,
12:47 I mean, it's nuts!
12:49 I'm not sure why exactly,
12:50 or how it makes any sense whatsoever.
12:53 As I mentioned at the top of the video,
12:54 this is another one of those throw in a late,
12:56 runtime, batshit, twist out of nowhere thing,
12:58 but it doesn't always feel cohesive
13:00 with what led up to this point.
13:02 Obviously the whole setup teases us the whole time
13:04 to believe that the parents are the real bad guys,
13:06 and the rug pull is that they were sort of in the right,
13:09 but then the whole crazy super killer monster
13:11 zipping around on the ceilings is just like, what?
13:13 At first I thought it was maybe one of those setups,
13:15 oh, Peter killed his sister in some accident
13:17 and suppressed the memory,
13:18 it's all coming back out or something like that.
13:20 That isn't a novel twist,
13:22 but it would have jived with things up to that point.
13:24 The monster angle is just bizarre,
13:26 and again, reminded me of the barbarian villain.
13:28 Some giant lady tearing people up, just accept it.
13:31 That's the state of screenwriting nowadays, apparently.
13:33 For example, just say the couple didn't know
13:35 what to do with their freak baby,
13:36 so they did some kind of black magic ritual,
13:38 and now she's a demon or some shit.
13:40 It's really not that hard to tie things together.
13:42 The point is, it feels like they don't care.
13:44 I don't know, I'm ranting about screenplays
13:46 in horror movies, so that's my fault.
13:48 Well, I guess I need to lower my own personal bar
13:50 at this point in my life.
13:53 Anyway, the spider menace is now on the loose
13:55 after duping her poor bro,
13:57 and with the worst possible timing,
13:58 Brian and his cousins show up to the house
14:00 in search of hockey stick-fueled justice.
14:02 Sarah takes them all out with surprising ease,
14:05 scurrying around unattacked, tearing dudes in half,
14:07 decapitating another one.
14:09 Again, it's ridiculous,
14:10 yet admittedly pretty bloody and entertaining.
14:12 Amongst the mayhem, Ms. Divine shows up
14:14 thanks to a curious call from Peter,
14:16 and shows up to save the day.
14:17 Unluckily, just as they make it outside,
14:19 Sarah snatches the boy by the hair
14:21 and scurries him back to the dungeon.
14:23 Ms. Divine saves him once more,
14:25 and they lock Sarah back up in her hole.
14:27 Well, that's not gonna last very long.
14:28 She flails her limbs to the great,
14:30 warning that he will never be rid of her.
14:32 He's just like her,
14:33 and in that way, he cannot escape his fate.
14:36 Then there's another little moment
14:37 with him back in his room,
14:38 and she appears behind him and things just end abruptly.
14:40 Was that last chunk a dream or something,
14:42 or what is going on there?
14:43 I get that they trap her again,
14:45 and that there are some lingering questions
14:47 regarding what becomes of Peter now,
14:49 but the extra chunk is just weird,
14:50 I guess just to reiterate that point.
14:53 Even him showing back up in the room,
14:55 he's obviously not gonna be living in that house anymore.
14:57 I mean, come on.
14:58 I mean, first of all, call the cops for frick's sake.
14:59 There's a lot to clear up there
15:01 with the bodies, Freakazoid Spider Lady,
15:03 and the dungeon that Mark single-handedly
15:05 built by himself, apparently.
15:06 Pretty handy with that hammer, I guess.
15:08 It's just too much logistically
15:10 to piece together in any meaningful way.
15:12 It's a mess.
15:13 Another crazy twist out of nowhere,
15:15 designed to throw the audience for a loop,
15:16 but again, doesn't really work
15:17 with what the story has been built up to that point
15:20 in any way at all,
15:21 just except the crazy monster lady
15:23 and that's fine, that's fine.
15:24 With that, we've reached the conclusion
15:25 of this ending explained for "Cobweb."
15:27 But don't forget, before we go,
15:28 you can send me requests for any movies or TV shows
15:30 you'd like to see me explain
15:31 by sending them my way on any of my social media accounts
15:34 at FoundFlicks.
15:35 What did you think of "Cobweb" and its ending?
15:36 Do you think the twist was too much or just right?
15:39 Let me know your thoughts down in the comments below.
15:41 Make sure to like, subscribe, and follow.
15:43 Thanks for watching FoundFlicks.