‘Vanished Into the Night’ Ending Explained

In a staggering achievement, Renato De Maria’s thriller Vanished Into the Night (Svaniti Nella Note) has quickly made its way to the top of Netflix’s global charts.

Starring English actress Annabelle Wallis (Malignant) and Italian A-lister Riccardo Scamarcio (John Wick: Chapter Two) in leading roles, the film is centered around a divorced couple based in southern Italy whose children are kidnapped for ransom.

Being a thriller, the film has multiple twists and turns, which eventually lead to an open ending. The conclusion of the Italian movie might have left many viewers confused and shell-shocked, so let’s talk about it.

The central question that left us puzzled was the identity of the kidnappers who abducted the children. When Pietro comes home with the bag of cash, he sees his kids in a calm state, having breakfast on the dining table. It is at this point that the viewers realize that the perpetrator was no one but Elena, who had snuck into her ex-husband’s house and drugged the kids and carried them home without anyone noticing. When the issue of abduction is brought up, she forces Pietro to reconnect with Nicola so that she can link the former with “dirty money” and use it against him in court to get their children’s custody.

After being flabbergasted initially, Pietro eventually pieces together Elena’s plan after finding an oxycodone tab in the toilet (Elena’s struggles with prescription medicine are well documented in the movie). He rushes to the airport on the pretense of signing consent papers for the children, which will allow them to leave for New York with Elena, only to counter-blackmail her by explaining the implications of her action in drugging the kids.

Pietro and Elena are then seen saying their final goodbye, and the former then decides to put the money he got from doing Nicola’s assignment to good use, paying off his gambling debts. Free from all the burdens and having resolved all his past issues, Pietro sees himself in a new light, ready to start a new chapter in life.

At the very end of Vanished into the Night, Pietro catches a glimpse of a fuzzy silhouette in his house. The fact that the hidden figure has a trenchcoat on suggests that it is Elena; however, the director ended the movie on an ambiguous note to let the audience decipher their own meaning. It could have been Elena herself, coming back after realizing her mistake and wanting to give the marriage another shot, or it could have been a fragment of Pietro’s imagination as he rues what could have been.