“Faces of Anne,” for the most part, was a semi-engaging thriller that made us wait a little too long for the reveal. We honestly applaud the attempt and the way the dots were connected, but the movie was unable to be the perfect high-concept thriller because they left too much for the ending. What we, as the audience, saw was a group of women whose faces kept changing, and they kept getting senselessly killed by a person in a mask. We tried to understand if it could be a visual metaphor for something, but the inconsistencies were too much for us to come up with an answer—that is, until the final 10 minutes. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that we found ourselves struggling to stay interested at times, especially during the second half, which is when ironically, the glimpses of the answer started presenting themselves. We have a feeling that “Faces of Anne” is the kind of movie that is enjoyed more the second time around than the first. This is how it all unfolds.
Spoilers Ahead
What Happens To Anne?
A girl wakes up in a hospital with no memory of who she is. She tries to call for someone and steps out of the room but finds the door locked. That is when she hears a voice from the next room telling her that her name is Anne. She is confused as to how the girl knew her name when she couldn’t see her. As she ponders this question, a bigger problem looms, with a cockroach coming out from behind the frame of a photograph. Anne throws a book and kills it, but she is scared of the dead body squished against the weapon. We apologize if the use of humor is a bit offensive for the description of this situation, but we spent close to two hours watching pretty much the same thing happen again and again. Getting back to the story, Anne is sedated and put to sleep as she struggles with the nurses. When she wakes up, she speaks with a therapist, who refutes that Anne’s face has been changing. She also hypnotizes her in an effort to get her to regain her past memories. It works somewhat because Anne has flashes of the ocean and a memory of being in a car. When she comes back to her senses, she tells the therapist that she doesn’t even know which face is hers, to which she gets the woman asks her whether she is sure if her face has really changed. The first time you watch “Faces of Anne,” this statement comes across as the therapist dismissing Anne’s troubles. But a second watch makes us aware that she was hinting at Anne’s multiple made-up personalities that were just flitting across her mind, creating a narrative with different faces. It was a reference to the unity of their situations, controlled by a traumatized outside force.
That night, a second girl, whose name is also Anne (let’s call her Anne 2), asks Anne to escape with her. But Anne is scared because she doesn’t trust her. However, that changes soon when she witnesses Anne 2 being killed by a demon entity, convincing her that something is wrong.
The nurses sedate her soon enough, and when she wakes up, she has another session with her therapist, who rubbishes her fears. A flashback brings tears to her eyes as she remembers a beach where she probably went with someone. That night, Anne tries to take charge of things and steps outside her room to try and escape the place. She takes two more Annes with her, one from her room and another from a bathroom where she believes Vitigo is in a toilet stall. The three of them make their way to the hospital office and take a look at the files, where they discover that every girl is named Anne. As the situation starts dawning on them, they see that Vitigo is on their trail. It seems to have no trouble being everywhere, and it kills one of the girls while the other drags away the first Anne, saying that they don’t have time to be brave. Anne 1 says the same thing when she leaves her behind the next time. But even she doesn’t end up surviving for long. However, it turns out that despite seemingly being killed by Vitigo, she wakes up in the hospital room. That night, the events of the previous day repeat themselves, with Anne 1 becoming one of the other girls she was with. It is a perspective shift with the same story. While they try to do things differently this time around, the results are the same, with Anne 1 getting killed by Vitigo. However, this time, when she wakes up, she is back in the real world. She is with her boyfriend at the beach, and she tells him that she can be her true self only with him. We come to know that her parents are divorced, so maybe the only safe space for her is outside her home.
Back at home, Anne notices some strange similarities between her dreams and the world around her. She keeps seeing the girls in her dreams on her social media, and she finds that her therapist drinks out of the same glass and jug as she had seen. At school, in the bathroom, she discovers that the other girls with her are also named Anne. Soon enough, she hears screams and understands that the “normal world” is part of an illusion, and she returns to the hospital full of Annes and Vitigo. The other night is repeating, but Anne has started piecing things together. She understands that there are multiple Annes, but only one of them will survive—the real one. Another chase with Vitigo later, they end up in a room where girls are reading aloud from a paper as if memorizing something. A woman walks by as if assessing them, and when a girl drops down, she is taken away on a stretcher. Soon enough, all the girls start shaking and fall unconscious, except for the two rogue Annes in the room. Vertigo kills one of them, and the other, Anne, fights back, successfully overpowering the demon. She unmasks it, only to discover that it is an Anne, like them.
‘Faces Of Anne’ Ending Explained- Who Is Vitigo? Is Anne Dead Or Alive?
We see that Anne, who was taken away, is being taken care of in the hospital. Meanwhile, the other Anne wakes up, and since the day is repeating itself, she kills the cockroach behind the photo frame again. But this time, she sees the writing on the open book. They are all cries for help, written by someone who comes across as suicidal. That is when the therapist comes back and tells her that she was the one to write all that. Another hypnosis session takes her to what can be presumed to be Anne’s original room. The girl in the hospital is the real Anne, and she had created multiple fake IDs on social media that she used as an outlet for her depression. She was likely sexually harassed at school, and that has had a long-term effect on her psyche. When she wakes up from the hypnosis, she finds herself back in the hospital, with the night repeating itself. This time, when she is attacked by Vitigo, she is rescued by Anthony, who is her favorite character in a video game. As he is taking her away in his car, they hit a deer, which sparks another memory for Anne. When she was a child, a similar accident had occurred. We are guessing it was her father who was driving. This flashback cuts through memories of her boyfriend and the day they spent on the beach. While it is not exactly specified what happened to him, we believe that he might either be dead by suicide or that he probably broke up with her.
In either scenario, Anne has faced the loss of a person she could be herself with, and she has never recovered from that. The dead deer turns into Vitigo and shoots her father before Anne finds herself back in the hospital. As Vitigo is about to shoot her, she tells it that only the real Anne can survive. Vitigo takes off her mask and gives the gun to Anne, asking her to make a decision. Anne, who can’t find a way out of this recurring nightmare, shoots herself. This leaves Vitigo, who is also Anne, dumbfounded. She is the only Anne left, and she finds herself back in the real Anne’s room. The therapist is also there, and she tells her that they are all identities created by Anne that also reside in her subconscious. She was a famous cosplayer who had tried to take her own life, and since then, the multiple Annes and the therapist were reliving her traumas every day in her mind. They were how she coped with the world—through characters in her morbid fantasy that seemed to be her one source of comfort during impossible times.
Towards the end of “Faces of Anne,” we see movement in the real Anne’s fingers, indicating that she might be waking up. This could finally put her characters to rest and stop their nightmare once and for all. She is already seeking help for her mental health, as her therapist told in her dreams. Hopefully, she will be able to reconcile the characters in her mind to find her true self.
Final Thoughts: What Works For “Faces of Anne”?
The movie has an intriguing concept that could have unfolded in a beautiful manner and introduced the intricacies of the human subconscious in a novel way on film. But it suffers from a lack of sufficient explanation of its idea. Do not get us wrong; it gives us all the answers at the end of the film, but that wasn’t satisfying enough considering the two hours we had spent watching the girls get killed mercilessly without any hope of escape. It was a very weak payoff, and we are less than satisfied with it. We believe this idea will certainly be explored in further movies. Hopefully, they will deliver better execution.
“Faces Of Anne” is a 2022 Drama Thriller film directed by Kongdej Jaturanrasamee and Rasiguet Sookkarn.
