Debutant Alan Scott Neal’s slasher horror, “Last Straw,” is a home invasion film filmed both from the perspective of the victim and the aggressor, through a structure that had been popularized by Zach Gregger’s “Barbarian,” where the perspective changes midway through the movie and finally joins the narrative towards the film’s final act. The directorial touches and the visceral nature of the depiction of violence are extraordinary for a debut. However, that is also offset by a strangely pointless narrative that veers dangerously close to exploitation cinema, but not in a good way.
Last Straw (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
How does the film open?
“Last Straw” opens with the visuals of a diner named Flat Bottom Bistro, and one can understand it is the aftermath of a violent event, with bodies strewn about and bloodshed everywhere. The scene is punctuated by a phone call from one Jake Collins, calling 911 and informs of a massacre at the bistro and his friend Nancy Collins lying on the floor, bleeding and dying.
Flashback 24 hours earlier, we witness Nancy sitting up and putting on her pants, checking on a pregnancy test. As it turns out, the test gave a positive response, which wasn’t on Nancy’s cards. Conversing with her friend Tabitha, who had come to join her at that spot and share a cigarette, we learn that Nancy is unaware of the father and is not the happiest about this situation. She also knows that if her father came to know about it, the response wouldn’t be ideal.
As she is driving towards the cafe, her car breaks down. Frustrated, she leaves the car idling and begins to walk towards the bistro, which is already quite late. As she crosses a bridge, she is met by one of the staff of the diner, Bobby, whom she asks for a lift, as she has to reach the diner earlier because she is the manager. As she reaches the diner, her bad day starts to become worse as she learns that she will not only have to take over the night shift but also work the night shift with Jake, one of the older employees of the cafe who is a “legacy” hire, considering his mom worked in the cafe.
Thus, Nancy’s father, Edward (the cafe owner), trusts him far more than Bobby, the guy Nancy is more comfortable with, even though she doesn’t share Bobby’s romantic feelings, which Bobby wants reciprocated. More importantly, Nancy’s father has a very important date that night, and since everyone else on the staff would rather punch out, he can’t afford to pay overtime.
What happens after Edward leaves?
Nancy’s demeanor, due to a wild party of the previous night and how the current day is going, along with the fact that she just vomited out the last night’s leftovers, is understandably not ideal. However, that doesn’t entirely mean that the onus of whatever occurs next is entirely on her. As it stands, the movie is clearly also painting the rest of the staff, especially Jake, as mildly against her authority, primarily because of nepotism working against their “meritocracy,” as she is placed in charge of the cafe by her father.
The undermining of Nancy’s authority by her staff truly comes into focus when she sees a group of teenagers on mopeds making a ruckus outside the diner. As she walks out to berate them, they throw a piece of roadkill at her. She doesn’t rise to their bait and walks away, flipping a finger at them. However, when the guys enter the cafe, wearing clown masks, and crowd around a table with the sole intention of harassing her, she has to pretend to call the cops to finally ensure they leave.
The problem, however, had been that the guys working as support staff wouldn’t help her in this entire sequence of events. Their distaste does stem from her attitude towards them, but there is also an added sense of privilege and misogyny governing them. It leads to a pivotal moment when she fires Jake in front of the entire staff, to his shock and anger. She also has a confrontation with Bobby, where she states very clearly that she doesn’t want to attend the night shift with him, and they are never going to get together.
Who is harassing Nancy by attacking the diner?
That night, as she is making some slammy jammies, she calls her father, informing him about Jake’s firing, much to his chagrin. She also learns that she is stuck on the night shift because the diner lights are on a timer, and somebody must manually shut it off. It’s all the better if they get customers, considering the movie also works as a commentary on the last breath of institutions like diners.
She, like the teenager she actually is, acts against her father’s orders and spends the night dancing away in the diner until she vomits again. While cleaning the vomit, she realizes, and then the slow-burn horror starts to become a reality. The masked guys (apparently) start to bang on the walls outside the diner. She finally calls 911 and asks to be sent a cop to help her before arming herself with forks. As she moves around the kitchen in search of weapons, the power goes out, similar to how her phone lines were cut off. She could also clearly see one of the masked assailants from the back door.
Finally, one of the sheriffs is sent to help her, and while he is helpful enough in trying to reassure her, his attitude isn’t the most welcoming because he clearly believes (after a preliminary search) that some kids are trying to terrorize her. He also believes that the kids might be part of a legit gang of masked assailants, and to that end, he decides to stay back to ensure that she is okay.
But Nancy, understandably so, is rattled. Clearly, the movie is trying to make a commentary on “the male gaze” itself, though it’s a legitimate question whether the narrative is sharp enough or nuanced enough to tackle that. Nancy, not liking the sheriff’s attitude, tries to emphatically convince him about the masked assailants and the mopeds, which suddenly reminds him of a horrific murder he had just been returning from. As he tries to convince her outside the diner to accompany him, he is attacked by one of the masked assailants from behind. Terrified, she runs to the back of the diner and hides there.
She sees Bobby cycling towards the diner and coming across the body of the police chief. Together, they rush back into the diner, and as they try to hide inside the freezer, Bobby tries to distract the assailants. However, Nancy is finally caught by the assailants, and they try to torture her and Bobby by tying them.
The leader of the assailants tries to torture Nancy by forcefully having her kiss Bobby before finally dragging her to the freezer section, presumably to rape her. Nancy manages to stab his leg with a fork and rushes outside, and in defense, she stabs another of the assailants as well, which turns out to be Petey, Jake’s brother and one of the staff of the diner. As Petey falls in shock, the leader, clearly Jake, cradles his brother.
Who are the masked assailants?
The movie then shifts perspectives, focusing on Jake’s perspective after he has been fired. He clearly struggles with mental issues, and he is unable to refill his medicines because he hasn’t paid his bills for the last three months. It is made quite clear that he is the current breadwinner of the family, and considering he has a brother to take care of, his life feels pretty much in shambles.
Thus, while returning home, he stops at the hideout of his local dealer, where he scores heroin, which he smokes in order to alleviate his headaches. As it turns out, it further enrages him because the brothers come across the group of kids with clown masks hanging around across a campfire in the woods, and Jake gives in to his anger and blames them for his loss, killing them horrifically with his unwitting brother as an accomplice. Next, he crashes into the hideout of his colleagues Coop and Bobby, who are getting drunk. He convinces them about his plan to scare Nancy, and they both agree—Coop, because like Jake, he doesn’t like her, while Bobby, the jilted lover, is all convinced of revenge.
However, as we see from the events described above, things don’t go according to plan. While the three of them drag Petey inside the diner, Jake orders Coop to find her. Meanwhile, Jake and Bobby get into a fight that results in Bobby being bashed on the head and brutally murdered. Meanwhile, Coop locates Nany hiding in the kitchen and goes after her, but Nancy pushes him towards the deep fryer, where, as his hands and face burn, he is knocked out by her.
Nancy then gingerly walks outside armed with a knife to find blood pooling from the side of Bobby’s head, who is lying dead at the entrance of the kitchen. She hides behind the counter as Jake searches for her. Jake is distracted by Tabitha, who comes calling upon receiving Nancy’s calls when she is hiding with Bobby. Seeing a knife brandishing, Jake terrifies her, and as she runs outside, Nancy runs downstairs towards the office, Jake following her. Nancy manages to circle back in the dark and stab Jake before rushing upwards. But finally, Jake catches up to her, escaping the cafe, stabs her from behind, drags her inside, throws her down, and then stabs her through the abdomen, killing her.
Last Straw (2024) Movie Ending Explained:
Is Nancy Dead?
It is pretty apparent now that the call Jake had placed to 911 informing about Nancy bleeding out had been to establish an alibi. Jake does that while getting out of his bloody clothes and driving away. Unfortunately for him, Nancy is an extremely resourceful woman. She remembers the pack of bad meat that she had seen shoved outside the diner while she had been spewing her vomit out in the morning.
Along with arming herself with forks, she had also padded her body with pieces of meat, which helped sell the image of her being stabbed and bleeding out when Jake had been attacking her. A couple of minutes later, Nancy, who is still clearly hurt, crawls up to Bobby’s body and takes the keys to the policeman’s cruiser that Bobby had armed himself with to either attack or escape from Jake.
As Jake rushes into his house and sets about clearing his house of any evidence that might put him at the crime scene, he is disturbed by a knock on the door. Armed with a meat beater, he opens the door, only to find the front porch empty. He does see a bloody diner batch stuck across the handle, which he recognizes as Nancy’s badge that he had stuck across her dress a couple of minutes ago. However, as he had been examining, he was stabbed by Nancy, who had sneaked inside from the back door.
As Jake falls to his knees, he tries to recount an old bad joke, which Nancy completes, before informing him that she hated that and slicing her knife across his neck, letting him bleed out. Nancy begins walking towards the outer limits of the town. As she lies down on the grassy knoll, exhausted and almost passing out from blood loss, she remembers the rest of the conversation with Tabitha, as she had raged about being caged within this small town and how her father would kill her if he found out she was pregnant.
But as she, finally collapsing and possibly dying, lies on the ground, her father finally catches up to her. Throughout the night, he had been concerned and tried to contact Jake to instruct him to check up on her. By the time he finally catches up to her, he is shocked and terrified, while Nancy, finally having a change of heart, mutters, “My baby” before the film ends.
It’s quite possible that she might live, and in the canon of resourceful final girls in horror films, she has earned her spot. The problem is the narrative itself, which is so thin and invested in directing up sequences of blood and gore that it forgets to make us care and be invested in any of the characters. It uses the shift in perspective to provide dimensions to both the victim and aggressor but ultimately succeeds at neither.
