This article contains spoilers for the plot and ending of Fear the Night (2023).
Neil LaBute’s Fear the Night is a home-invasion thriller attempting to slyly subvert home-invasion thrillers and some of their sillier tropes. It’s only variably successful, mostly thanks to a sturdy Maggie Q performance, but it crams some twists and turns into its 90-minute runtime, delivering a fair number of grisly deaths as well.
Plot-wise, here’s the general idea. Tess, an alcoholic combat veteran, goes with her sister Beth and several of their friends to the middle of nowhere for the bachelorette party of their younger sister, Rose. On the way, they antagonize a group of local hicks who subsequently carry out a siege on the homestead looking for a hidden stash of drug money.
Naturally, Tess takes control and leads the other women, almost all of whom are useless by design, in fighting back against the invaders.
Fear the Night Ending Explained
What are the men looking for?
While it isn’t initially clear what Perry and his gang of miscreants are looking for, it later becomes clear that they’re after a stash of drug money hidden in the property’s attic. This is the proceeds from a meth operation that the place’s “caretakers” set up without – it seems – the knowledge of Tess’s father or her sister, Beth, although more about Beth later.
Perry and his boys tie up the caretakers and set about retrieving the dough from the house, not wanting to leave any witnesses behind. The caretakers told the men that the women were their girlfriends and all in on the operation, a somewhat pathetic twist meant to poke fun at the idea that loser drug dealers need to embellish their own private lives.
Nevertheless, Perry believes them, and it isn’t until the final confrontation with Tess, who he wants revenge on after the convenience store incident, that he realizes his mistake.
Who dies in Fear the Night? Who survives?
Only Tess, Beth, Noelle, and Mia survive Fear the Night.
Needless to say, then, there are many deaths throughout the film, so here’s a rough accounting of all of them for fun. This doesn’t account for all of the goons, since they’re basically all killed off by Tess with one notable exception, listed below.
Rose is the first of the girls to get killed, being shot through the chest with an arrow while she’s sitting on the porch.
The stripper/chef Alfonse gets shot straight through the eye when he’s trying to take control of the situation.
Esther is next to go, killed off-screen when she’s hanging her head out of the upstairs window trying to get a phone signal.
Divya, who frankly was kind of annoying anyway, is shot through the mouth with an arrow while she’s opening the door.
Perry slashes Bridget’s throat after she tries to imply that Tess might have been in on the drug operation. A traitor’s death.
Tess manages to kill one of Perry’s men who is letting air out of the car tyres by stabbing him in the neck. Mia smashes one’s head in with an ornament, Tess kills another with a fire axe, and Beth and Noelle tag-team one particularly unpleasant goon, suffocating him with a pillow and hacking his junk off with a potato peeler.
Tess, finally, kills Perry in a one-on-one knife fight.
Did Beth know about the drugs?
Curiously, Fear the Night spares some time after the attack to make a point of Tess being interrogated by the obviously chauvinist local sheriff.
The sheriff doesn’t believe her story – most of which, to be fair, is lies – and is especially skeptical about the timing of the incident. Throughout the film, it has been repeatedly intimated that perhaps someone in the house knew of the drug operation, and the implication is that it’s Beth. However, this is not specifically addressed and is left a little ambiguous.
After the grilling, Tess does give Beth a sisterly hug, but they don’t really exchange any words, and after, Tess leaves with Mia. The film ends on this rather morbid note with the alcoholic Tess having had a beer, her obvious PTSD still afflicting her, potential legal ramifications for what happened at the house, and a lack of surety around who Tess can really trust.
Not exactly a happy ending, then.
What did you think about the ending of Fear the Night (2023)? Let us know in the comments.
