The ending, explained
The ending of The 9th Life of Louis Drax reveals that Natalie Drax caused every one of her son's accidents, that she pushed her husband Peter off the cliff during the birthday picnic when he worked out what she was doing, and that Louis, having watched it happen, walked off the edge himself. Dr Perez names her condition as Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Louis then wakes from the coma, after hearing his dead father tell him to live.
What the ending reveals about Natalie Drax
Natalie Drax is revealed to be the author of the accidents her son has spent the film narrating as bad luck. The catalogue Louis treats as a private joke, 8 near-deaths before his ninth birthday, turns out to be a record of a mother's work: poison in sweets given to the boy, an electrocution arranged near a socket, a smothering with a pillow. Nothing about the boy is unlucky. The joke he has been telling the audience is the one piece of evidence nobody read correctly, including the audience.
Sarah Gadon plays Natalie as the film's most sympathetic adult for most of its length, which is the mechanism rather than a miscalculation. Dr Allan Pascal, played by Jamie Dornan, falls for her; Detective Dalton, played by Molly Parker, spends the investigation hunting the missing father; and both are working from her account of the clifftop. The reveal costs the film its romance and its manhunt in the same scene.
What happened on the cliff, in order
What happened on the cliff is a sequence of 4 moves that the film holds back until its last act.
- Natalie offers Louis sweets at the birthday picnic and refuses to let Peter have any.
- Peter, who has begun to suspect what she has been doing, confronts her and the argument turns physical.
- Louis runs to the cliff edge; his parents follow, and in the struggle Natalie pushes Peter over. He dies.
- Louis, having seen it, walks off the edge himself.
The fall that opens the film is therefore neither an accident nor an attempted murder by the father. It is a 9-year-old's own act, taken in front of what he has just watched, and the whole police plot has been chasing a man who was already dead at the bottom of the same drop.
What the film withholds, and why it can
The film withholds the clifftop by making its narrator the one person who cannot be questioned. Louis speaks to the audience from a hospital bed in a coma; he is charming, he is funny about his own catalogue of disasters, and he is not lying so much as declining to arrive at the part he cannot bear. Withholding is in character rather than imposed on the plot, which is the difference between a twist and a cheat.
Two devices keep the withheld material circulating without disclosing it. Letters appear at the clinic that read as though Louis wrote them, though he has not moved for weeks. And Pascal begins waking from sleep to find prescriptions in his own hand that he has no memory of writing, the boy reaching the doctor through the one channel available to a patient with no voice. Both keep the audience convinced that Louis knows something long before the film says what it is.
Why Louis wakes at the end
Louis wakes because the film's last scene resolves what the coma was for. In his closing narration he considers staying under permanently, since inside the coma he has his father's company and outside it he does not. Peter's voice tells him the world is beautiful and that he has to grow up and live in it. The boy opens his eyes.
The choice is the point. Every previous life in the count of 9 was taken from Louis by someone else; this one is the first he keeps on purpose. Read that way the coma is not a medical condition the film needs to fix but the only place the boy has ever been safe, and waking up is the risk.
Why the film's disclosure belongs to the camera
The film's disclosure belongs to the camera rather than to Louis, and that is the structural cost of its last act. For most of its length the film runs on the boy: he introduces himself, he counts his accidents, he decides what the audience is given and in what order. When the clifftop finally arrives it arrives as a flashback the audience watches directly, assembled out of material he has never volunteered. The narrator is still on the soundtrack. He is no longer the source.
Jensen's novel gives the reader one channel, the boy's account from inside the coma, told to the bandaged figure he calls Gustave. Anything the reader works out has to be worked out from what Louis is prepared to say.
Aja's film keeps the voice-over and adds a camera that goes where the boy cannot. By the last act the audience is being shown what Louis is not narrating, which is how the film can disclose the clifftop without waiting for him to reach it.
That is the exchange the 2016 adaptation makes for clarity, and it is one reason several reviewers who found the plot satisfying still found the last 20 minutes tonally adrift: the explanation is delivered by a different instrument from the one that set the question. Where the novel's own final pages go is a separate matter, and this page leaves it open, because the accounts in circulation disagree and none of them is worth relying on here.