Abhiroop Das
Helmed by Sophie Tabet, ‘Stone Cold Fox’ dials time back to 1986, where Fox, a former drug dealer, has just made an escape from her cultish commune. However, she has a very specific reason for this risky breakout mission, and that is to locate her long estranged sister, Spooky. As one thing leads to another, and Spooky seemingly finds her way in the commune’s rabbit hole, Fox realizes that she must face the worst challenges yet, all over again. Goldie, the drug kingpin who reigns over the compound, is hell bent on revenge, and the only way to one-up her is to do something no one can expect. Thus, this thriller comedy movie follows Fox juggling extraordinary circumstances and befriending extraordinary people in this roller coaster ride, where reality is not what it seems to be. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Stone Cold Fox Plot Synopsis
‘Stone Cold’ begins with a flashback into the lives of two sisters, Frankie and Spooky, who have practically been glued to each other for most of their childhood. However, following a local scandal, their father is ostracized at every turn, which leads to a fight with their mother and an ultimate separation. By a strange twist of fate, Spooky is to stay with her mother, while Frankie has to lead a difficult life outside, and as their paths diverge further, a grown-up Frankie, now named Fox, finds herself alone and homeless. It is at this point that she meets Goldie, a charming drug dealer who begins a relationship with her. While Fox is initially overjoyed at her new, indulgent lifestyle, she soon realizes that Goldie is a control freak who has a cult-like community of women whom she treats like a harem.
One time, while partying and smuggling drugs, Fox finds a girl on the dance floor who looks just like Spooky, but she is stopped by Goldie’s men before any further contact can be made. Frustrated with her caged lifestyle and determined to find her sister, Fox concocts a daring escape. The plan is to wait for Sergeant Billy Breaker, Goldie’s bagman, to make his biggest shipment yet, and then steal it before making her escape. While Fox follows every step in the plan to perfection, she doesn’t realize how far Goldie is willing to go for revenge. Although Fox lives and skips towns in perfect secrecy, things ramp up when Spooky is seemingly kidnapped right before her eyes. While giving chase, Fox gets into an accident and wakes up at the house of two eccentric siblings, Frankie and Dylan.
While Frankie is a health expert with an extremely vivid imagination, Dylan is a hyper movie buff and wishes to live out a cinematic life. What unites them, however, is their mastery of the martial arts, and with a little bit of requesting, they agree to teach her everything they know. Meanwhile, Kelly Corbett, the new police officer in town, grows increasingly suspicious of Breaker and his obsession with locating Fox. As the case unfolds, she realizes that this is all part of a drug syndicate waiting to be busted, and her hunt coincides with Fox, Frankie, and Dylan’s break-in. Using their combined physical prowess, the squad cuts through enemy ranks, but just as Fox pushes past Breaker and comes face to face with Goldie, her greatest fears come true at once.
Stone Cold Fox Ending: Does Fox Find Her Sister? What Happened to Spooky?
‘Stone Cold Fox’ ends with Fox realizing that her sister, Spooky, has been long dead, and this entire time she had been imagining a past where the duo simply separated. Goldie’s cruel games come to an end when Fox finds her holding “Spooky” at gunpoint. However, a closer look reveals that the girl’s face is not familiar at all, and this entire time, Goldie has been exploiting Fox’s fragile grasp on memory and reality. With only a few strong images of her sister left in her mind, Fox quickly believed the girl to be Spooky, but the reality of things is something far more gruesome. In the middle of her confrontation with Goldie, Fox is forced to remember the actual version of what happened at her home and why she separated. In a flashback, we see Fox’s mother lying unconscious in the washroom, and while Spooky is panicking, her elder sister seemingly doesn’t care.
Things soon turn a 180, however, when Fox hears a thud in the washroom and rushes in to find Spooky unconscious as well. The implication here is that both mother and daughter slipped and hit their head on the washroom floor, and while the former’s fate isn’t elaborated upon, the latter is confirmed to have met her end there. The trauma induced by this reality is simply too much for Fox to bear, and instead, she runs away from the house, conjuring a fake version of what happened. This explains why there are old police missing cases for Fox, which don’t quite add up with her story of moving out with her dad. It is possible that she felt immense guilt for not paying attention to her mother, in an action that backfired and took the life of the only person she truly loved. Thus, Fox’s memory distortion gives an inside glance into a complex trauma response, which has now been shattered with a single blow.
A big part of Fox’s journey is about accepting that Spooky is no longer a part of her life. While that is initially presented by the narrative in a roundabout way, Goldie’s cruel tactics merely reiterate, on a symbolic level, that Fox’s search for Spooky has left her directionless and suffocated. Faced with the bitter reality, she nearly gives in to Goldie’s clutches again, knowing that it means returning to a life of imprisonment and intoxication, which is likely what has fuelled these hallucinations in the first place. As such, in the end, Fox learns to accept the truth and lets go of Spooky from her mind’s cage. However, given that we never see Spooky’s actual dead body outside of quick glances, there might be a possibility that her story isn’t over yet, but that goes beyond the bounds of the movie.
Is Goldie Dead or Alive? Does Breaker go to Jail?
While Goldie is almost successful in getting Fox back into her trap, she ends up making a mistake by revealing her hand too early. Once in control of her former lover’s gun, Goldie explains that this entire operation was a ruse to regain Fox’s trust for just long enough to kill her. This is in line with what we have seen of the drug kingpin so far, as while she is extremely possessive of her community, she is not one to forgive either. Where she makes a miscalculation, however, is in assuming that Fox has no way of fighting back without a gun. Fox has been physically training this entire time, and that comes in handy in this scene, when she effortlessly thrashes Goldie around her own compound, overpowering her in no time and pushing her into a glass cabinet.
One of the broken shards from the cabinet and the broken bottles ends up piercing Goldie’s neck, and in the final stretch of ‘Stone Cold Fox,’ she seemingly bleeds out to death. Once again, while we never catch a sight of her dead body, the implication is strongly there due to how much blood she loses, and how quickly. The fact that she ultimately dies at the hands of an alcohol bottle is fitting, as it brings a cyclical end to her life of causing mass substance abuse. With Goldie dead, her women of the cult are freed at last, and here we see that Crystal and Minx’s last-minute support has paid off at last. While there is a little possibility that Goldie somehow survived and escaped, she is unlikely to make it that far, given that the police are already on the scene.
With the arrival of Officer Kelly Corbett and her team, Breaker also meets his defeat at last. Notably, he is the closest to killing Fox in the entire movie, and nearly seems to have won it all when Kelly attacks him from behind, saving not just Fox, but every innocent person in the community. Given what we have seen of Breaker’s no-witnesses policy, it is very likely that his final plan was to wipe out everyone, including Goldie, but Kelly’s timely intervention avoided that. The two officers have locked heads from the start of the movie, and it is ultimately Kelly’s honesty and dedication towards police work that gives her the upper edge. While she was assigned to the town only temporarily, it is likely that since the place is short one police officer, she has a strong chance of making the town her new home.
What is Next For Fox? What Happens to the Drugs?
Following her survival at Goldie’s compound, Fox reunites with Crystal and Minx, this time not as members of the community but as true friends and potential business partners. While we don’t know exactly what she does in the immediate days and weeks following the incident, a timeskip several months ahead shows that Fox has started her life from scratch, this time with an adventure company known as Spooky’s Roller Run. The indoor rink is a true homage to Spooky, who is now remembered as an enthusiastic teen who loved nothing more than roaming freely on the rollers. Fox’s cherishing of this memory instead of falling into grief shows the growth she has made as a character, learning to let go of her dark past and embrace life anew.
Although there is no clear explanation as to how Fox got her hands on a roller run company, it is very likely that she sold off all of the drugs she stole and is now using those enormous sums of cash to create successful endeavours. We see a foreshadowing of her business instincts earlier in the movie, when she gets to store her stash in a bowling alley locker for just a whiff of the drugs to the employee. It is likely her new location is tied up with the bowler, and she is now expanding her business expertise towards real companies and ideas. However, given her past as a solid risk taker, it might be a matter of time before she lets instincts take over and begins gambling with her life once again. Spooky’s memory, however, serves as a constant anchor point from now on out, especially for Fox.
While Fox’s core character arc is already concluded, ‘Stone Cold Fox’ leaves enough crumbs in its finale to create room for a sequel. To begin with, Fox’s last lines in the movie ominously talk about her immense luck, and it is possible that she is about to have the same luck turned upside down. While Goldie is dead, her entire drug operation has not disappeared overnight, and with no leader in sight, they might turn to Fox for assistance. Whether she chooses, or even wishes, to return to the life of cheap thrillers remains to be seen. Frankie and Dylan’s presence in the story also means that it always has time and scope for action sequences, which means Fox might venture into more risky territories with her film buff friends and spread a healthy dose of chaos wherever she sets foot.
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