Helmed by Joel David Moore, ‘Some Other Woman’ follows Eve Carver, whose happy life with her husband, Peter, becomes the subject of several strange phenomena, all of which begin with the appearance of a mysterious woman. Eve is the first to notice her presence, and with each iteration, the woman begins to invade portions of her life, much to the protagonist’s alarm. What twists the story further is when the people around her find no disturbances in reality, forcing Eve to question the reliability of her own senses. This psychological thriller blends supernatural horror with a deeply interpersonal one, creating an identity crisis with no easy resolution in sight. As the story progresses, the line between reality and fiction nearly disappears, and the looseness of protagonist and antagonist as narrative categories becomes readily apparent. In the end, Eve decides whether she is to submit to her new life or challenge its very foundations. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Some Other Woman Plot Synopsis
The movie begins with Peter and Eve living the dream in the Cayman Islands, but nothing is quite as it seems. The couple originally planned to shift here for a few months. However, the timeframe has since ballooned up to several years, with Eve settling into this new lifestyle against her wishes. She reveals to her best friend, Chelsea, that she might be pregnant, which has the potential to open up several new possibilities in her life. However, when she gets her period in the middle of a part, all hopes come crashing down. That night, she lays her eyes on a mysterious woman seemingly emerging out of the water, but a closer inspection reveals no traces of such activity. The following night, she sees the woman once again, and that trend continues for a while. All attempts by the protagonist to confront her stalker go to waste, and she has to watch in horror as, one by one, chunks of her life begin to disappear or get changed entirely.
Things come to a head for Eve when she wakes up one day to find herself replaced at work by none other than her stalker. The woman’s name is revealed to be Renata, and as time goes on, the proximity between the two women begins to increase. To her surprise, Eve is told that Renata is her long-time friend, and with pictures backing up that claim, the protagonist quickly loses her grasp on reality. When she discovers that Peter had an affair with Renata, she rushes to the latter, only to discover more inexplicable happenings. When Eve returns home, however, the story takes a 180-degree turn, with Peter claiming that he is married to Renata, and Eve is an outsider trying to break into their house. All of the protagonist’s friends corroborate his words, leaving her more paranoid than ever. With reality seemingly going against her, Eve steps into a boat that takes her to the middle of the ocean.
Elsewhere, Renata and Peter continue their married life, eventually even having a child together. However, before long, Eve pays her a visit once again in the exact same fashion as Renata did, emerging from the water. Before long, the same circumstances begin to repeat, this time affecting Renata’s life. As all of her beloved things either get altered or go missing, tensions begin to arise between husband and wife. This culminates in the tragic discovery that Renata’s baby seemingly never existed, and that breaks her entirely. However, Peter, who is oblivious to these twists and turns, gets frustrated and seeks comfort in a stranger, who turns out to be Eve. When he tries to get intimate with her, she stops him midway and prepares to leave. Just then, the protagonist is ambushed by Renata, who is in anguish and wishes to blame everything on her. The ensuing chase takes them back to the boat, and a showdown in the heart of the ocean awaits.
Some Other Woman Ending: Is Eve Real? Does She Become a Singer?
What emerges out of the feverish narrative of ‘Some Other Woman’ is a conclusion that speaks to identity, self-love, and the freedom to pursue one’s ambition. Following a tense battle with Renata that may or may not have been all in her mind, Eve falls into turbulent waters and struggles to win her fight for survival. This directly ties to the opening sequence of the movie, as well as its numerous allusions to being drowned. In the end, Eve manages to rise to the surface just in time and makes her way back to the shore. Exhausted, she is woken up the next morning by the mysterious street musician, who likens her experience to that of souls desperately clawing their way back to reality, in the hopes of finding love and purpose. This thematic link sets up the future for the protagonist, as the next time we meet Eve, her life is radically different.
At the start of the movie, Eve recalls her desire to become a singer at one point, with her married life in the Cayman Islands putting a stop to that prospect. In the final sequence, she picks up that thread once again, in a powerful monologue that redefines the story of the fisherman and his wife. While we are initially led to believe that the wife died a tragic death and has longed for family since, Eve asserts that her fall from the boat has liberated her in a sense, unshackling her from a limited lifestyle and expanding her consciousness to the water, traditionally a symbol of boundlessness. To that end, Eve inserts her own perspective into the myth and follows in its footsteps, becoming a singer herself. The final sequence of the movie features her getting ready in full splendor, with an entire audience ready to hear her perform on stage. This brings her arc of self-discovery full circle, giving her the independence she sought all along.
Eve’s performance on stage also doubles as a means of confirming that she is a real person, as she, and everyone around her, is no longer bound by a cycle of reshaping memories and alternating realities. Conversely, the protagonist’s decision to live out her life on her own terms becomes a narrative stronghold, indicating that the fractures between reality and illusion were as much a psychological phenomenon as they were physical. One possible interpretation is that Eve’s sense of purposelessness and lack of control allowed malicious forces to take over, creating gaps in her reality where everything is snatched away. As such, her final decision to rebel against that openly confronts the story’s premise and reverses it by the end. The creative decision to make Eve’s performance the final note of the movie only adds to the sincerity and expression captured through music.
Do Peter and Chelsea Remember Eve?
While Eve sets out to carve the life of her dreams, the physical effects of this new reality on her former friends and family remain wrapped in ambiguity. Given that Peter, along with Chelsea, Salvador, and all of his friends, set camp in the same bar where Eve is about to perform, the clash and subsequent questions of identity become more pertinent than ever. A key detail in this sequence is that Peter is noticeably not wearing a wedding ring, which can mean one of two things. Either the couple has divorced off-screen and gone their separate ways since, or the very fact that he was ever married has been fundamentally erased from his life. The information about his wedding with Eve, or later Renata, keeps switching around, only reiterating the flexibility of the concept in relation to Peter’s life. Additionally, Peter’s choice to prioritize his professional life over his relationship with Eve throughout the movie also points to the contrast between the two.
Alongside Peter, it is also possible that Chelsea and Selvador have forgotten about Eve’s relationship with them, and the strongest indicator of this is how they interact at the bar in the final scene. If the group had retained their memory of the protagonist, their reaction to her performance would likely have been different, but the jovial mood on screen suggests that a complete reality warping might have taken place. On the other hand, there is also a distinct possibility that the final scene will take place well into the future, where Eve has already wrapped up all her personal conflicts with Peter, Chelsea, and her other friends. In such a case, the ending can be perceived to be a happy one, where all characters have moved on with their lives. This also ties into the street musician’s comment about souls, making it a universal phenomenon rather than a uniquely isolated case.
Is Renata Dead? Is She the Ghost of the Fisherman’s Wife?
The fight that erupts on the boat does not change only Eve’s life, but also Renata’s as the two battle for control over their married life, and by extension, the overarching narrative itself. However, when the duo jumps into the water, the real differences between the two come out into the open and simultaneously get stabbed. While Eve swims to the surface, gasping for air, Renata seems to disappear into the water. That we never catch another glimpse of her births the horrifying possibility that she is dead, but the facts on-screen paint a vastly different picture. Renata’s decision to dive into the ocean appears to be voluntary, which contributes to the interpretation that she is not a human but a ghost. In particular, it is implied that Renata is, in fact, the ghost of the fisherman’s wife. As far as the original tale goes, the woman seeks connections in the real world to make up for her lost family, and that idea directly ties to Renata’s arc, making her a potentially supernatural being who shaped the entire plot.
The idea of Renata being the fisherman’s wife lines up with her first appearance, as she is seen coming out of the water, with no further indication of her past. Secondly, unlike Eve, who she replaces, Renata becomes pregnant and gives birth to a child, which might have been her attempt at simulating her desired reality. To that end, Eve’s reentry into the story and the revelations surrounding Renata’s picture-perfect life can be reinterpreted as a sign of her imaginary constructs collapsing. This, in turn, also reframes the fight between Renata and Eve as the latter’s attempt to take her life back. While Renata’s ultimate failure causes her to return to the water, it is Eve’s decision to leave her family life behind that breaks the cycle. With the protagonist out of the equation, Renata has no married couple to observe and emulate, which brings a complete end to her involvement in the story.
Are Eve and Renata the Same Person?
While there are many hints sprinkled throughout the movie that point to Renata being the woman from the mythical tale, an explicit moment of connection between her and Eve brings that notion under scrutiny. Midway through the fight, Renata realizes that any injury dealt to Eve also appears on her body, creating a direct, bodily link between the two. While this thread is never explained following the fight’s conclusion, Eve’s injuries remain. As such, it is possible that Eve and Renata are in fact the same person, which makes all the damage that she sustains throughout the movie self-inflicted. The theory that Eve might have Dissociative Identity Disorder also fuels this idea, making Renata an extrinsic representation of the protagonist’s inner conflicts. One potential reading is that Eve was influenced by the story about the fisherman and his wife, and inserted herself into the narrative, creating the persona of Renata as an antagonistic figure.
Another interpretation of the link between Eve and Renata targets their mutual suffering throughout life. Given that both characters yearn for a family life at the start of the narrative, it is possible that Renata, in an attempt to replace Eve, ends up merging with her. This gives more context to their cyclical character tragedies and the reality-warping nature of the story. As such, the two go from being inverse of each other to merely two versions of the same traumatic experience, which eventually collide. However, the fact that Renata returns to the water, whereas Eve restarts her life from scratch, paints them as two different figures, at least on a thematic scale. Their overlapping wounds, as such, can mean that while pain is a common experience, how a person reacts to it can paint vastly different stories and endings.
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