Dhruv Sharma
‘365 Days’ is being labeled as Poland’s response to the renowned ’50 Shades’ movie series and rightfully so. With its blend of English, Polish and Italian, the film walks you through an erotic “bad boy meets good girl” love story with a mild undertone of crime to it. Although, for the most part, it brims with graphic sex scenes, it leaves a few unanswered questions in its closing moments. So if you’re looking for some answers surrounding the film’s ambiguous ending, read on further.
Plot Summary
In the opening scene of ‘365 Days’, the head of a mafia gang and his son, Massimo, get shot down by an enemy. Just moments before this shootout, Massimo was spying on a girl at a nearby beach. While his father ends up dying from the gun wounds, Massimo lives and claims that he dreamt of the girl from the beach before he recovered from his deadly injuries. Determined to find the girl of his dreams, he goes around looking for her. In the meantime, the girl Laura dates a guy who doesn’t give her much attention. On Laura’s birthday, they visit a resort for a vacation, and that’s where Massimo meets her for the first time.
Being a mafia who never takes “No” for an answer, Massimo abducts Laura in the hope that she will fall for him. For obvious reasons, Laura turns down his proposal, but instead of being too brash with her, Massimo makes a deal: All she has to do is stay with him for the next 365 days, and if she’s still not into him after that, he’ll let her go. Although a little reluctant and resistant towards his offer, Laura soon starts settling into her lavish lifestyle with the mafia. Unlike her husband, Massimo even gives her a lot of attention and showers her with love.
365 Days Shower Scene
Speaking of “showers,” amidst all the developments of their uncanny love life, there is also a shower scene that captures the essence of their complicated relationship. In this scene, Laura first walks into the shower and is soon followed by Massimo, who keeps his promise of not touching her unless she wants him to. But to his surprise, while he keeps his distance, Laura looks at him with awe, and in some ways, craves him. Lured by her gaze, when he gets closer to her, she just teases him and leaves. This scene shows how, despite being attracted to him, Laura holds herself back. On the other hand, Massimo hates being rejected, but when he’s with Laura, he keeps all of his hubris inside.
The Ending: Is Laura Dead?
In the second half of the film, Laura either becomes a classic victim of Stockholm syndrome, or she simply falls in love with the gangster. Either way, she develops positive feelings for her captor, and despite knowing almost everything about his criminal background, she accepts him. Unfortunately for her, as soon as they start getting closer, he asks her to go back home to stay with her parents. Assuming that he’ll come back to get her, Laura heads back home. However, several days go by, and Laura hears nothing from his side. She slowly starts drifting back to her old lifestyle and even runs into her ex at a bar. When her ex tries to get her back, she rejects him and returns to her room. That’s where she finds Massimo again.
After arguing for a bit, they start making love, and that’s when Laura notices a wound on Massimo’s chest. When she asks him about it, he just claims that he has handled whatever business he had, and everything’s fine now. Soon after this, they decide to get married. In the closing moments of the movie, Laura goes shopping with her friend Olga. While she heads back, Massimo’s right-hand man Mario suspects that rival mafia family is about to kill Laura. He tries to warn her but is not able to reach her phone. In the meantime, while all this goes on, Massimo talks to Laura on the phone. But her car soon enters a tunnel, and she loses her network. Mario rushes to Massimo and tells him about the sinister plot of their rivals, and in the ending scene, a police car can be seen parked right outside the tunnel, suggesting that Laura’s car never made it out of there.
Now before we explain what happened to Laura in the end, let’s first try to deduce who wanted to kill her. As mentioned earlier in this explainer, Massimo had previously asked her to go back home and was seemingly protecting her from something or someone. Later, when he shows up in her life again, he can be seen with a wound on his chest. The ending seems to have some connective threads with all of these plot points. As suggested at the beginning of the movie, Massimo has an arch-enemy who even killed his father. Later in the film, when Massimo asked Laura to go back home, he probably tried to get his revenge from this rival, and that’s how he got that gash on his chest.
When it comes to Laura, she is probably still alive and has only been abducted by Massimo’s nemesis. Moreover, ‘365 Days’ has been adapted from a book trilogy, so there’s a lot still a lot more to its storyline. In the sequel of this film—if there is one—Massimo will try to rescue the love of his life and make sure that she does not meet the same fate as his father.
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