The line between reality and imagination is often taut and strict. Sometimes, that line does blur. This is what makes the paranormal so enthralling to many.
But The Life Before Her Eyes (2007) isn’t about the paranormal. It stays in reality but inverts the way most look at it. Instead of going back, it moves forward from an irreversible moment.
Starring Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood, this film jumps around the timeline showing us the life of old and young Diana McFee. Wood’s young Diana is a rebellious teen. She drinks, smokes, and gets pregnant by her much older boyfriend (played by Oscar Issac).
Older Diana has the polar opposite life. She is married to the professor she fell in love with and has a lively young daughter. But things start falling apart soon enough.
Thurman’s older Diana suspects her husband is cheating on her, and her little daughter has seemingly started hating her. To make matters worse, she is falling apart under stress and grief at the 15th anniversary of the school shooting she was involved in. But what actually happened during that horrific school shooting? That’s shown in the end.
Evan Rachel Wood and Uma Thurman play a young and old Diana McFee, respectively. In the end, it’s implied that everything about the older Diana was a lie or mirage concocted by a dying young Diana. She saw it all in the short time between getting shot by a school shooter and dying.
So instead of the film making the character revisit the scene of the traumatizing incident, the movie allowed its main lead to envision an alternate life.
What Does the Ending of the Life Before Her Eyes Mean?
Throughout the film, smartly placed hints let viewers know something is off. However, it’s difficult to decode the entire picture before the final act. In the ending act, viewers see Thurman’s Diana go to her high school on the 15th anniversary of the school shooting that changed her life. The receptionist questions if she was among the few who survived.
She doesn’t answer, just smiles and enters the school. After placing flowers where the students got murdered, Diana heads to the washroom where her best friend Maureen’s life got cut short. Just as she’s about to step in, there’s a sound of a phone ringing. It’s a call from her daughter’s school. Diana hurriedly goes to the school to find that Emma, her kid, is missing.
The authorities suspect that she must have run into the woods behind the school. Diana searches till night but doesn’t find her. In exhaustion and pain, she yells Emma’s name, and suddenly she appears in front of her.
Diana can’t believe her eyes, but she is relieved. Then immediately, she gets shot. Things start to make sense from here.
On the fatal day of the school shooting, Diana and her best friend Maureen were in the washroom when the shooter, Michael entered and said he would spare only one. Maureen volunteered herself and got shot.
But Diana wasn’t saved that day, as was implied throughout the film. Instead, she had volunteered herself after a bit of hesitation. Michael had shot her too, and she had died.
So the question is- who is the older Diana? Is she a ghost? A mirage? Or an alternate ending? The answer isn’t spelled out by the film. But the theory is that older Diana is a bit of all three. She’s a ghost, mirage, or an alternate happy ending to Diana’s life that ended way too fast. Moments before her death, Wood’s young Diana envisions a good life for herself because, in her actual life, she never had that kind of stability. But is it actually an ideal and stable life?
What Was the Point of the Life Before Her Eyes?
The Life Before Her Eyes is based on a 2002 novel by Laura Kasischke. The film is a dissection of trauma and how the mind deals with it. The project smartly explores this through the lens of female relationships. Most stories about trauma place the victim or survivor right in the place of the incident.
The general theme of such projects is to make the character go through those emotions again to heal and emerge stronger. However, The Life Before Her Eyes inverts that trope. Instead of seeing an older Diana attend the 15th anniversary of the school shooting, viewers see a young Diana grow up and live a stable life.
But why do we see that life fall apart in the film? Wouldn’t it have been ideal to end the movie with just a shot of Thurman’s version being content with her husband and daughter? It’s perhaps because Wood’s younger version doesn’t have the maturity to envision what she wants. So her older perfect life is a magnified projection of what she had experienced till now.
The cheating older professor husband of Thurman seems to be like the cheating older boyfriend of Evan Rachel Wood’s Diana. Also, the daughter Emma is clearly the kind of daughter, Diana thinks she could have had if she hadn’t gone through with the abortion. So Emma rebelling against older Diana could be a reflection of her behavior towards her parents.
So everything comes full circle at the end as Diana’s reality bleeds into a dream or imagination.
What Is the Secret Ending of The Life Before Her Eyes?
There’s no secret ending per se to the film. All that there is the revelation that perhaps Evan Rachel Wood’s young Diana had a lot of regrets in her life that she seems to realize when she gets shot. So she makes up an ideal life to maybe experience some before passing away. It’s a ‘what could have been’ scenario.
So what do you think of the ending?
Do you think the older Diana was merely a deathbed projection of the younger Diana? Or was something more happening?
Let us know in the comments below.