Taking place in the desert of Riyadh, NAGA is a Netflix film that, like its protagonist Sarah, ultimately loses its way. The ending of the film reveals the outcome of Sarah’s drug-addled descent into the dunes, though it’s a fairly unsatisfactory conclusion that relies on a lot of contrivances and convenience and does little to capitalize on the film’s underlying themes.
NAGA Ending Explained
After Sarah makes it to the camp, she is in the middle of her hallucination. She couldn’t find her boyfriend and she ventured into a well-known poet’s camp. She found out that Abu Fahad didn’t write his famous poems and that his assistant was the one who made him famous. This is probably the most random part of the entire film because it just doesn’t mesh well with Sarah’s story at all.
What does Sarah discover about her boyfriend?
Shortly after Sarah found out that her boyfriend was having an affair because she saw him kissing another woman. So on this date, he drove her to the camp where he had been smuggling drugs in his car and living a double life. Sarah is now the other woman and her boyfriend said that this affair needed to end. Then the police showed up and began to raid the entire area for drugs. Sarah and her boyfriend run out of the camp and straight to his car. He kept apologizing and they agreed that they would end the relationship the second they got out of this situation. As they were running they didn’t realize that the cops followed them out there and now Sarah was in massive trouble.
For the cops not to find her so her dad won’t be alarmed, she hides in the trunk while the cops get to her boyfriend. The police take her boyfriend away leaving her deserted in the middle of the desert locked in a trunk. Like any thriller, the suspense builds when Sarah sees that her battery is about to die and there is no way she has enough to send a text or even make a phone call. Even if she could, she had hallucinated so there’s no way she had the actual location. That’s why there is a massive issue with the script because these are mistakes that could have been avoided if they were fleshed out a bit more. Or made into a short film rather than a feature.
Does Sarah make it out of the desert?
The film begins to drag when Sarah makes it out of the trunk and sees a camel in the distance. She can only assume that it’s the mother of the camel that her boyfriend accidentally killed. We learn in this film that camels are vengeful creatures and will remember who wronged them. For the camel not to see her, Sarah hides underneath the car. She knew she couldn’t stay there so she ran until she found a little house that had people inside. Thankfully the owner agreed to drive her home when he could and she was grateful. But that was short-lived when three men became rowdy and wanted to attack the owner. Instead of trying to fight them, she managed to lock them all inside the house and take one of the quads out to the main road.
The film relies on convenience to show the lengths a teenager would go through to get her freedom, but not all freedom is worth the time. Sarah does manage to find another truck driver to get her to the nearest building which was the meeting spot for her father to pick her up. Her phone battery magically comes back and she sees that her father had texted her saying that he would be late picking her up. So in the end, she did make it out, she did get to the meeting spot on time, and that night was never spoken about again.
What did you think of the ending of NAGA? Comment below.
