At the beginning of Don’t Move, Iris (Kelsey Asbille) has been through hell: the tragic death of her young son and a bout of depression that leads her to a breaking point. But that isn’t the end of her story. By the time the credits roll, she’s overcome a psychotic killer (Finn Wittrock) who uses a paralytic drug to trap her in her own body. But in a twisted way, this ordeal teaches Iris a valuable lesson about herself. 

“To me, the movie is a conversation with herself about the will to live,” Asbille tells Tudum. “That’s what makes the genre perfect for this kind of exploration” — in that, by playing a character who is first trapped in her own grief, and then literally injected with an immobilizing drug, “we are able to show her existential paralysis physically rather than just metaphorically.”

“Kelsey starts the film helpless,” producer Sam Raimi tells Tudum. “She’s been through a lot and she feels as though she’s reached the end of her road. I think through the interaction with Finn’s character throughout the movie, even though it’s a suspense movie, it’s also a character film and she develops what she had lost –– that desire to live.”

It takes a threat to her life in the shape of Wittrock’s Richard to reveal the true depth of Iris’ survival instinct. Read on to learn more about how Iris ultimately escapes at the end of the chilling new thriller.

How does Richard paralyze Iris?

He uses a paralytic drug that takes 20 minutes to set in, and an hour to wear off. Serial killer Richard lures Iris in with a counterintuitive strategy: talking her out of suicide as she stands on the edge of the cliff where her son died. “He has to be someone that you buy as an empathetic person, someone who is curious and who will go there and successfully talk someone off the ledge quite literally,” co-director Brian Netto tells Tudum of Wittrock. 

But after he bonds with Iris by revealing his own tragic loss (of his high school girlfriend Chloe in a car accident), Richard reveals his true colors. “I think he does have human empathy and does have human emotions,” Wittrock tells Tudum. “He’s just also really good at manipulating them, and he himself is a very good actor.” And Richard drops his mask in memorable fashion, injecting Iris with a paralytic drug and kidnapping her. He’s planning on taking her to his nearby cabin, where he’ll torture her before finally dropping her body in a lake.

“[Finn] is so right for this role because he’s so charming,” Raimi says. “You trust him. Even though people have seen him play the villain, he’s got this leading man quality that makes him great across from Kelsey.”

But despite that twisted charm, Iris doesn’t go quietly. Before the drug sets in, she crashes the car and makes a run for it, leaping into a roaring river. The river carries her straight into the backyard of an older gentleman, Bill (Moray Treadwell). At this point, Iris is fully frozen, only able to blink in response to Bill’s queries. “The script lays out the stages of paralysis, but there’s an emotional experience and internal struggle that you have to convey, and you are so limited physically,” Asbille says. “That was the challenge, and it was fun to figure it out together.”

How does Iris escape the cabin?

With Iris paralyzed, the filmmakers faced a self-imposed obstacle. “One of the biggest challenges that I was afraid of was the fact that the script asked our actress to be still for so many minutes in the movie, and I was afraid our audience would become restless,” Raimi tells Tudum. “But [Kelsey] does such a great job of performing with her eyes and the most subtle movements of her face that it works splendidly.”

Asbille worked with a trainer, Eric Johnson, to pull off the surprisingly strenuous task of remaining motionless. “Rather than just building muscle, we focused more on endurance in order to sustain isolated movements, especially in the movie’s more extreme environments,” she says. 

Still, the filmmakers leaned on Wittrock and Treadwell for the next sequence, which sees Richard scam his way into Bill’s cabin pretending to be Iris’ worried husband searching for her after a car wreck. “There’s a large portion of this movie where [Kelsey] doesn’t talk and [Finn] has to continue the narrative and continue pushing things along,” co-director Adam Schindler tells Tudum. “So it was really important that we found somebody that we felt could be engaging enough to be evil but you kind of like him.”

With Iris hidden behind Bill’s couch, Richard brings the full force of his charm to bear on Bill, desperately appealing to the widower’s sense of compassion. It almost works, until Richard’s phone rings, revealing his original lie (that he needed to borrow a phone after losing his in the crash). “I just found it a really great challenge, like how can I genuinely convince this person that my story is true?” Wittrock says. “And he almost gets away with it!” 

Instead, Richard overcomes Bill, sets the cabin ablaze, and nearly leaves Iris to die. But she summons the strength to tug on the blinds, alerting him to her presence and saving her life — for now. 

What happened to Richard’s girlfriend?

After picking up Iris, Richard takes a surprising phone call — from his daughter. It’s a scene that Wittrock was immediately drawn to. “The moment I remember reading the script that was like, ‘I have to do this,’ is when he gets this phone call from his family at home,” Wittrock says. “Suddenly something is awakened; he completely transforms and suddenly this whole other life has opened up.”

Iris is stuck with Richard once again — and, as she regains control of her vocal cords, she begins to needle him by picking at the scab of his girlfriend’s death. It works, in a way.  

Ever the actor, Richard has come to believe in the truth of his own performance, but Iris gets him to break character. “In his twisted way, he does actually respect her and he does really like her,” Wittrock says. “It’s not going to stop him from murdering, because that’s what he does, but I think she touches some very vulnerable nerve in him, maybe the last one that he has left.”

So Richard reveals the truth behind his sob story. The incident didn’t make him lose his mind, he says — it helped him find his clarity. The last words he said to Chloe? “Thank you.” In watching her die, Richard discovered the killer inside himself.

Directors Netto and Schindler caution audiences not necessarily to take Richard’s words at face value. “It’s kind of a messed up therapy session for both,” Schindler says. “Whether he is telling you the truth or not, there’s glimmers of truth in what he’s saying.” 

For his part, Wittrock played the scene as if everything he’s saying is true. “He’s trying to re-create that experience, that initial actual love that he had and that he lost and that he’s trying to understand himself,” Wittrock says. “Why did [he] feel so good in that one, that dark, dark moment? I think him doing this to all these different women is him trying to solve that puzzle piece.” 

Vladislav Lepoev

Why does Iris thank Richard at the end of Don’t Move?

Running out of time before his family arrives, Richard decides to forgo the cabin and head straight for the lake, hauling Iris into a rowboat and preparing her for her own death. At the same time, Iris is regaining her range of motion; in the boat, she succeeds in stabbing Richard through the face with his own hunting knife and shooting him with his own gun. He falls overboard, and Iris is left to struggle back to shore as the boat, riddled with bullet holes, sinks.

Once she reaches land, however, she receives a surprise: Richard has also dragged himself out of the lake, slowly bleeding out. She leaves him with one final kiss-off, an echo of the words that marked Richard’s own breakthrough: “Thank you.”

“I believe there is a moment when Iris chooses to live, not just survive,” Asbille says of the final moments of the film. “That’s what resonated with me, fighting desperately to overcome something that has left you feeling paralyzed.” In thanking Richard, she is acknowledging his role in that evolution, even if it was granted under murderous motives. She’s now finally free from her paralysis — physical and emotional. 

That means Iris’ “Thank you” is much more sincere than it might initially seem. “Kelsey put her heart into the film and really made that journey of someone who was hopeless, [to] someone who had hope again,” Raimi says. “I know that because I feel very moved by the end of this film. She’s got a soul and she knows how to give the audience a peek at it.”

Netto and Schindler agree — it’s a moment that puts Richard in his place, but it also has a core of truth. “It’s double-edged, because she’s sticking it to him on one end, but there is some genuine realization on her part of, ‘Whoa, OK, I do owe this man my life because I didn’t want to fight for my life before I met him,’ ” Netto says.

“I believe the line in the finest sense of it: ‘Thank you for inspiring me to live again,’ ” Raimi says. 

Wittrock saw the weight of the moment as a challenge. “If you’re reading it as an actor, you’re like, ‘OK, we’ve got to earn this ‘Thank you.’ It’s a big arc to get to the end, and so in the back of our head, I think we were both sort of like, ‘We have to get to a place at the end of the movie where this line is believable.’ ”

For their directors, there’s no doubt that the pair made it there. “The realization on his face when she says his words back to her, is one of my favorite parts of the movie,” Schindler adds. “It’s just like, ‘What? I can’t believe this is happening.’ ”

Don’t Move is now streaming on Netflix.