Warning! Spoilers for Spontaneous below.
For a story about a horrific subject matter, Spontaneous ends on a cautiously optimistic note. Although it never answers any pressing questions, the dark comedy guides its heroine Mara (Katherine Langford) away from a terrifying situation few of friends escaped from. Here's a look at everything that happens in Spontaneous' ending.
Based on the book of the same name by Aaron Starmer, the movie follows a love story amidst a horrifying phenomenon. Mara and Dylan (Charlie Plummer) meet and instantly fall for each other during their senior year of high school. As their young love begins to blossom, a terrifying occurrence begins to take place suddenly among their classmates — members of the senior class begin to spontaneously combust with absolutely no explanation at all. Mara and Dylan have to fight to survive in a situation that is completely out of their control.
Despite the fact that Spontaneous's characters are exploding around them, Dylan and Mara manage to fall in love with each other while somehow managing to avoid exploding. But tragically, near the end of Spontaneous's ending, Dylan combusts right before Mara's eyes. Mara understandably spirals after Dylan's sudden death and pushes her friends and family away. But after a meaningful conversation with Dylan's mom, Mara sets off after graduation to live the life that Dylan would have wanted for her.
In Spontaneous, the phenomenon of the exploding students takes the nation by storm. One student explodes in the beginning of the film, and an increasing number of spontaneous combustions follow. Things get to the point that federal agents swarm the town and isolate the students in order to keep the rest of the school safe from a potentially contagious disease. Despite the fact that agents believe they have found a solution to the problem, a domino effect of mass combustions takes place during Spontaneous's climax, further devastating the town. As Katherine Langford states in Mara's monologue during the movie's final scenes, the combustions stop just as suddenly as they started. Ultimately, no one ever figured out what caused them in the first place.
While the lack of answers may make for a frustrating viewing experience, the truth of the matter is that the reason behind the combustions actually doesn't matter. Spontaneous is more about the lesson learned from those random explosions than why they happened. The book adaptation takes a drastic approach to the idea that tomorrow isn't guaranteed and underscores why it's important to live with that concept in mind before it's too late. The surviving students in Spontaneous are sure to take that message with them after the events of the horror-comedy movie.
Once the combustions grow out of control in the horror-comedy, the authorities intervene in the hopes of saving the surviving students. Agents quarantine the remaining students and begin drug trials to suppress the explosions. Students are subjected to a series of failed tests until one seems to finally do the trick. The drug is nicknamed "the Snooze Button" as it delays students from exploding. Unfortunately, the first batch of the Snooze Button drug is defective and eventually leads to about a dozen students exploding within a matter of minutes. Mara reveals in her final monologue that the government claims the drug is truly effective, but they just got the first batch manufactured. As the explosions suddenly stop for no reason, it's hard to say whether or not it was the drug really did the trick. Yet that just reinforces Spontaneous's message of seizing the day. The Snooze Button may or may not have helped and will continue to help the remaining students survive, so they need to continue to live each day like it's their last.
Both Mara and Dylan survived the initial round of explosions. That gave them the opportunity to fall deeper in love with one another. They confided in each other about their plans after high school and Dylan even told Mara he loved her. But Dylan was tragically a victim in the final wave of spontaneous combustions. As it happened right before Mara's eyes, she was initially inconsolable. She couldn't leave bed for days and once she could, she turned to alcohol to cope. She essentially became a functioning addict, stealing alcohol in order to numb the pain. Making it worse is that the combustions in Spontaneous became known as the "Covington Curse." As Mara was the only person present for multiple explosions, she and her classmates became convinced the may have been the curse herself. Those accusations only pushed her spiral further.
Dylan's sudden death reminded her that nearly all of her friends were gone, as well. For a while, Mara didn't want to live anymore, herself, lost in her understandable grief and depression. Things changed when she ran into Dylan's mom at his grave. The two had a meaningful conversation about how much they missed Dylan, which caused her to finally acknowledge her feelings. Once Mara let herself feel everything she had been pushing down, she finally began to heal. That put her on the path to climbing out of her despair and trying to live again.
Once the combustions stop with no explanation, Mara decides to move on. She takes Dylan's old car and hits the road. But what happens after that isn't quite clear. Kathering Langford's Mara delivers a monologue that ultimately has a note of hope, declaring that after the tragic events at their school, her future is her own, even in her heartbreak. She imagines a life in which she can spend her days with her best friend, find success in a future career, fall in love and get married. Ultimately, Mara made the active decision to be happy and optimistic about her future, while always keeping the memory of Dylan with her. Her realization is the culmination of Spontaneous's overall theme. And while the idea of living like there's no tomorrow is a well-known concept, Spontaneous takes that concept to an extreme by showing people's lives cut unexpectedly short right at the point at which their entire lives are still ahead of them. The students who survive got to see firsthand just how precious life is. Thematically, it could also be seen as an allegorical story about the emotional intensity of the teenage years and how things like breakups can feel utterly devastating and life-ending during high school. Eventually, however, life moves on.
It's also important that there is no explanation for why some students combusted and others survived. The show doesn't explain it, and that's the point: Sometimes, awful things just happen and there's no reason for it. A person can either learn to accept the things that have happened in their lives after their grief and choose to move on (or at least, seek help to), or they can dwell in the past forever and allow tragedy to break them. While Mara's final monologue is a little too on the nose, she still summarizes this idea quite nicely. Spontaneous encourages its audience to live every day as if they could literally spontaneously combust at any moment. Living with no wasted time opens up a world of possibilities, just as Mara sees for herself at the end of Spontaneous.
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