🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

You’ve met John Wick, Tyler Rake and the Gray Man — now get ready to meet Lou. In the new thriller, Allison Janney plays the titular character, a mysteriously skilled loner currently holed away on an island in the Pacific Northwest. When we first meet Lou, she is bitter, jaded and ready to wrap up her affairs. But when the daughter of her next-door neighbor Hannah (Jurnee Smollett) is kidnapped, she’ll have to go on the warpath to rescue the young girl — and maybe reveal a few things about herself in the process.

In Lou’s explosive final moments, we learn a few key details about Janney’s character that throw the entire film in a different light. “Who is Lou? This is the big question of the movie,” director Anna Foerster tells Netflix. 

So, what happens at the end of Lou? 
 

Before the film reaches its climax, we learn Lou’s biggest secret: she’s not merely a stranger to Hannah and her daughter Vee (Ridley Bateman). In fact, she’s a former CIA agent with a familial connection to the pair. Hannah’s abusive ex-husband Philip (Logan Marshall-Green) is Lou’s son, and she rented her property to the fleeing Hannah. It’s a twisted capstone on Hannah and Lou’s odd-couple chemistry. 

“They’re characters who have had to make very different and very difficult choices in their lives,” producer Hannah Minghella says. “So, to see them thrust onto this journey together and to see how their relationship evolves is really the thrill of the film.”

But in a partnership between a single mom and a former CIA agent, it’s important to make sure the scales are balanced. “It was really important to me to create those two characters that are very different, but yet what was very important to me is that Hannah is never, ever coming across as the damsel in distress,” Foerster says. “It was very important that she could see eye-to-eye with Allison... with Lou, and that she’s a force of nature in her own right.” So, when Hannah discovers Philip has been leaving behind taunting postcards for Lou, she puts the pieces together and abandons her secret mother-in-law.

Of course, what Hannah doesn’t know is that Lou’s relationship with Philip is slightly more complicated than your typical maternal bond. “The journey of Lou during the movie is her starting through some terrible circumstances [and] finding a way to resolve the issues of her past that she was afraid of facing in the beginning,” says producer Jon Cohen. As we learn, he’s the product of an illicit affair Lou had as part of her information-gathering for the CIA. To complicate things even further, Lou used stolen documents to blackmail her former employers into investigating Philip and getting him away from his wife and daughter.

The chase finally comes down to a heated confrontation on the beach of Orcas Island, with Lou and her son duking it out as the CIA closes in and Hannah flees with Vee. “To me this fight is really the story,” Foerster says. “It’s about the two characters and about how those two characters interact with each other in their final moments.” Foerster wanted the fight to feel half-hearted on both ends — not a climactic throwdown but something more exhausted and reluctant.

All things must come to an end, of course. With a CIA sniper circling above in a helicopter, Lou pulls her son in for a final hug, and the sniper riddles the pair with bullets. They fall into the water below and neither surfaces.

Back at Lou’s cabin, Hannah opens the letter Lou told her about in their reconciliatory last meeting and discovers that Lou has left her property to Hannah. She sells the land and leaves with Vee and Lou’s dog, Jax. On the ferry to the mainland, Jax spots a figure on an upper deck. He cocks his head but stays quiet. As the camera pans over the upper deck, we see it’s a woman watching the small family with a pair of binoculars.

What are we meant to understand from that final shot? Did Lou’s bulletproof vest come in handy? “I hope audiences take away a new, hopefully iconic action character,” Cohen says. Beyond that, we’re just as in the dark as Hannah and Vee are. Lou Deux, anyone? 

Lou is streaming now on Netflix.