Let’s Break Down Dementus’ Fate in ‘Furiosa’
Furiosa has landed, and while the end of the movie links up pretty neatly with Mad Max: Fury Road, there’s one storyline with a somewhat ambiguous ending: the fate of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth).
The movie implies that one version of the story is “true,” but let’s break it down!
Warning: this article contains massive spoilers for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
Furiosa ends with a climactic face-off between Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Dementus, whom she traps in the Wasteland with no supplies and nowhere to go. Furiosa reveals her identity, makes the impossible demand that Dementus give her back her dead mother and lost life, and then holds a gun to his head.
Dementus, though, gives Furiosa a warning. They’re very much alike, he says. He’s also lost loved ones—in fact, he partly took on Furiosa as his surrogate daughter because his own kids were killed—and underneath all that violence and cruelty are the remains of his own soul. There’s calcified pain at the core of Dementus’ villainy, and Furiosa could suffer the same fate if she keeps questing after revenge.
From that point on, the story drifts into the realm of folklore. The History Man narrates some theories about what Furiosa did to Dementus out there in the sand. Did she shoot him? Drag him behind a motorcycle? Let the crows eat him?
Then we get to what the movie implies is the “real” story. Trapped in the atrium at the top of Immortan Joe’s citadel is a man with a fruit tree growing from where his crotch used to be. Old and emaciated, the man is kept alive so that the tree can feed on him. This man is, of course, Dementus. When the first fruit ripens, Furiosa picks it and gives it to Immortan Joe’s wives, whom she’ll later smuggle out of the citadel.
So is that what really happens to Dementus? That’s what the film indicates—but it’s intriguing that legends have apparently arisen about how Furiosa dispatched him. It could be that Dementus is still in that atrium during the events of Fury Road, still quietly suffering.
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