A barman called Will (played by Armie Hammer) finds his life is disarray in Wounds, when he picks up a cursed phone - and we're here to break down the phone's curse and the film's bizarre ending. The Netflix and Annapurna Pictures movie provides a surreal, and more-than-slightly disturbing insight into what happens when you meddle with forces you don't understand. Directed by Persian filmmaker Babak Anvari, Wounds follows Will down a road of degradation after one rowdy night at work.
Slow and creepy, the plot of Wounds stays entirely with Will from beginning to end. Using only a few locations, the film sets up a mythology that Will, and by extension us, are only partially privy to. What we ultimately see is the result of someone else's dark magic, making what happens all the more spine-chilling and difficult to discern.
Part possession story, part demonic summoning, all psychological, Wounds doesn't do much to explain exactly what happened and why. Here's a breakdown of the exact details, and some of the ideas behind them.
In the last scene in Wounds, Will goes to the second floor of the building his bar is in to visit his friend Eric (Brad William Henke). At this point, Will's life has fallen apart - partly because of the strange, phone-driven curse that has afflicted him, and partly because he had been in a paranoid, loveless relationship. After dumping his girlfriend and walking out of his job, he needs a place to stay, and pops into Eric, whom we haven't seen since the start when his face is cut open in fight.
Will finds Eric's place in a mess, covered in filth and cockroaches. The gash on Eric's cheek has become blackened from infection and he tries to get Will to leave. In an altercation, Will questions Eric about a supposed gift he was to give him. The gift was from the mysterious group that have been stalking Will since the same night Eric got injured – the ones tailing him in a black car and messaging Will through the phone full of bizarre, bloody images he picked up at the bar. The present is that phone, returned after Will threw it out of his car, which Will finds in Eric's bedside table drawer.
Upon finding the phone, Will receives another message telling him that his gift is "wrapped in flesh" - and realizes that it's referring to Eric's body. Will calls Garrett, and receives a barrage of atonal noise on the other end. He leaves the call on the line, and a swarm of cockroaches emerge in the apartment, while something starts to burrow out of the scarred skin on Eric's face. As the ritual intensifies, Will asks the creature coming forth to enter him, and, in a clever twist, the movie breaks the fourth wall by having cockroaches start landing on the camera. They obfuscate the monster, the same entity that we'd been seeing in swift glimpses up to this point, leaving Eric's cheek and going into Will's mouth before the film cuts to credits.
The titular "Wounds" are a set of tomes of Gnostic ritual, literally titled 'The Translation of Wounds' in Wounds. Gnosticism is an ancient belief system that preaches rejection of the material world in favour of the spirit realm, and that there is a God who is unknowable, who may summon lesser entities called Aeons that we can more directly interact with.
Garrett and his friends, the group of college kids whose phone Will picked up in the bar, had found a set of these books and decided to try some of their rituals out, buying into occultism through online forums. The ceremonies are based around summoning through pain and affliction, hence the need for living flesh to be involved. The images and videos Will saw on the phone, of dead bodies, and something trying to crawl out of a decapitated head, were that group's adventures in discovering that the Wounds worked.
In the aftermath, Garrett and the phone became some sort of conduit - a connection between the Aeon and our world, who would lead it to a perfect vessel. He found that perfect vessel in Will. It's an interesting plot contrivance, using aspects of found footage and making Will's story essentially the sequel to a more formulaic film about a bunch of college students being dumb around forces they can't possibly comprehend.
Through-out the film, Will is surrounded by cockroaches. The bugs act a visual marker for the connective energy of the Aeon, and a metaphor for the toxicity Will has become enveloped in. We first see it when Will is visibly uncomfortable with his friend Alicia, played Zazie Beetz, having a new boyfriend, and they keep appearing in Will and his girlfriend's apartment.
Later, towards, the end, the spirit brings forth hordes of the creepy-crawlies as its process nears completion, drawing a direct correlation between personal demons and the actual demonology in the film. Living in a stale, toxic life is like living with constant insects - and never enough repellent to deal with them all.
At first it seems like Will's life is being torn apart by the Aeon in Wounds, but the spirit is only speeding up what was already happening. Will's relationship with his girlfriend, Carrie (Dakota Johnson), had become stale, and he believed she was cheating on him. His job was enjoyable but dead-end, and he'd developed feelings for Alicia, whose new relationship he almost ruins out of envy. The Aeon hangs over all of these happenings, haunting Carrie in particular, and some of the dialog is delivered in such a way that it's unclear if Carrie is really saying it, or if Will is simply imagining things differently.
Will had become hollow - an empty shell, going through the motions - making him the ideal subject for a spirit to call home. The framing of the story strongly suggests the entire ordeal was staged by the college kids, who made sure that Eric got gashed, and the phone was left over for Will. Perhaps he was followed for much longer than what's actually shown in Wounds. How it all exactly happened is a mystery, which is an apt metaphor for a life in which we meander through things until suddenly everything is different. Aeons (probably) aren't real, but jealousy and unhealthy relationships can still be extremely toxic. Best not to give any bad spirits anything to feed on inside you, if you can help it.
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