Fans and Critics Are Giving Deadly Reviews to ‘Deadly Illusions’ (SPOILERS)

Spoiler Alert: This article contains spoilers for Deadly Illusions.

The new film Deadly Illusions is currently the No. 1 title on Netflix, perhaps because viewers are curious to know what kind of film earns a 17 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

But after reaching the end of the flick, many of those same viewers are scratching their heads. “Wait, what the hell was with the Deadly Illusions ending,” one person tweeted. Another wrote, “Don’t waste your time watching Deadly Illusions on Netflix. The ending made no sense and it got a little weird.”

Let us clear it up.

Deadly Illusions is a 2021 thriller film, written and directed by Anna Elizabeth James (Destined to Ride, Emma’s Choice), which Netflix released on March 18.

“A bestselling female novelist, suffering from writer's block, hires an innocent young woman to watch over her twin children,” the official logline teases. “As the novelist dangerously indulges in her new bestseller, the line between the life she's writing and the one she's living becomes blurred.”

In the film, Sex and the City star Kristin Davis plays Mary, the novelist. My Best Friend’s Wedding alum Dermot Mulroney plays Tom, her husband. Shameless star Shanola Hampton plays Elaine’s her friend. And Awkward actress Greer Grammer — daughter of Frasier star Kelsey Grammer — plays Grace, the new nanny.

The end of Deadly Illusions shows that Mary was right to be worried about Grace: The nanny, under her alternate personality “Margaret,” not only attacks Tom in the shower but murders Elaine and tries to frame Mary for it.

Grace is hospitalized, and in a flash-forward at the end of the movie, a forgiving Mary visits her in the mental institution.

And in the last moments of the movie, a woman wearing Mary’s outfit leaves the hospital with sunglasses on her face and a scarf over her head, leading viewers to think Grace attacked Mary and wore her outfit to escape the facility.

Melissa Chambers, who played Aunt Lotty in the film, endorsed the theory, tweeting, “My take is Grace/Margaret killed Mary and escaped to kill again.” And James, the writer-director of Deadly Illusions, “liked” Chambers’ tweet, perhaps validating that interpretation.

Now, back to that 17 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Amid other critical pans, the Los Angeles Times’ Gary Goldstein writes, “Movies don't come much clunkier than Deadly Illusions, an unconvincing mishmash of psychodrama and erotic thriller filled with silly plot holes, obvious dialogue, and risibly bad actions and reactions.”

And here’s a burn from Decider’s John Serba: “The movie is very much a connect-the-dots paint-by-numbers fill-in-the-blank thriller, from the knife-slashy logo to the her-book-becomes-her-reality plot to its onslaught of raggedy-jaggedy final-act twists. The latter are ludicrous to the point of incomprehensibility, leaving us with a scrapheap of confusional kitsch littered with things that could be red herrings … It all means doodledy stinking squat”

Deadly Illusions is streaming on Netflix.