The Shaft 2 is currently storming the Netflix charts as an abysmal sci-fi addition more than four years after the first film, The Shaft, and is at number 1. In the end, the horror dystopia seems to raise more questions than it provides answers. But two very different explanations for the ending will help you understand the film better. Of course not without it Spoilers for parts 1 and 2 can come off.
The ending of The Shaft 2 explains: Two interpretations are possible
Shaft 2 works according to the same social experiment of solidarity and egoism that was the basis for Part 1: In one vertical prison with 333 floors A platform with food moves through the floors from top to bottom. Because more than one portion is usually eaten upstairs, not everyone gets the same amount and fights and cannibalism break out because those on the lower floors are starving. But every month the prisoners randomly move to a new level.
In part 2 of this sci-fi scenario, Perempuán (Milena Smit) becomes the new main character. First she bows to the law of the militant group that wants to enforce justice and equal food for everyone, later she rebels against their cruel methods of punishment. Only after an hour do we find out Twist that The Shaft 2 is a prequelso before The Shaft plays. In the end, the heroine decides to escape. But on the 333rd floor she finds a boy and sends the child up from the prison floor, like the protagonist from part 1, Goreng (Iván Massagué), did. She meets him in the mid-credits scene at the lowest level with many others. But what does all of this mean? Two possible explanations suggest themselves.
Explanation 1: Shaft 2 reveals a much larger experiment
The key to the first possible explanation of the ending is that children playingwhich are repeatedly interspersed into the plot of Der Schacht 2. You play in an unknown room on a pyramid with a slide. They could easily be read as another metaphor for prison because they, too, are fighting to get to the top of the pyramid. But the winner ends up being taken away and taken to the (officially) lowest level of level 333. So the boy that Perempuán finds during her escape and for whom she gives up her own attempt to escape became placed on level 333.
What’s more: the woman who leads the boy away is Miharu (Alexandra Masangkay), who in Part 1 was an apparent inmate looking for her daughter. But apparently she is in reality Part of the prison staff and just played the desperate mother. Because when she leads the boy away from the pyramid room, we also see her “daughter” among the children, to whom she pays no further attention. The girl is probably just another child bait who will later be brought to level 333 for Goreng (because The Shaft 2 is a prequel).
How does the shaft benefit the children?
But what purpose do the children serve? then in the larger experiment? The Netflix sequel provides no information about the prison authorities’ motives. At this point we can only speculate about the intention behind it:
This explanation does not resolve all the question marks, but it does serve as a pointer to one even bigger conspiracy. Their master plan is withheld from the audience, but it points to one possible third partwhich could resolve this.
In this scenario, the shaft may not be underground at all, but rather a Space prison. Part 2 puts these ideas in our heads when Perempuán escapes the long-term anesthesia at the end of the month by eating a painting (with special ingredients): she awakens in weightlessness and watches as the institution collects bundled corpses, prisoners to new levels distributed and exposes the child to level 333.
Explanation 2: In Netflix’s The Shaft, everyone is dead at the end
The second possible explanation for the ending of The Shaft 2 is even darker and is based on a statement that director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia made to Digital Spy about Part 1: “For me the lowest level doesn’t exist. Goreng is deadbefore he gets there and it’s just his interpretation of what he had to do.” Even if the Spanish filmmaker puts his work into perspective “open to interpretation” and he leaves the interpretation of the ending to the audience’s imagination, it is nonetheless a radically different perspective.
Because if Goreng is dead at the end of Part 1, then Perempuán must also have died at the end of The Shaft 2. This is supported by the fact that they move several times in weightlessness Hits head bloody. This is also supported by the fact that she meets Goreng in the end credits scene and obviously recognizes him (“You? What are you doing here?”). That’s why many speculate that he could be the ex-partner from her previously told life story, whose son killed her dangerous dog art installation in an accident. Here they could reunited in the afterlife meet each other.
Why else should both of them be able to meet companions down there again, such as the deceased fellow prisoner and knife owner Trimagasi (Zorion Eguileor) or the bald man Zamiatin (Hovik Keuchkerian), who set himself on fire? “Same goal, same happiness” awaits her. In extreme extension, this could even mean that from the beginning Prison is not a prison at all, but a kind of limbo was in which people prepare for their way to death – and have to morally prove one last time what fate they deserve.
The one mentioned again and again in Der Schacht 2 also fits with death Messiah figurewho is said to have gone without food for a month and then fed other prisoners with her own meat. However, we never meet this redeemer figure and he becomes the ultimate religious metaphor: every prisoner will have to decide about their real existence according to their own beliefs.
According to this afterlife interpretation of the Netflix film, the children would either be just another hallucination or a Symbol of rebirth. Because at the end a woman in the basement of the shaft informs Perempuán about the children: “Only they are allowed up. […] Your journey is over. But he gets a second chance.” So maybe the boy is her purified soul who can try again after death?