There’s a major, mind-boggling twist in the new Netflix action thriller.
Jason Momoa leads the cast for Netflix original film Sweet Girl – the directorial debut of filmmaker Brian Andrew Mendoza, which has recently been added to the streamer’s library.
The action-thriller tells the story of Ray (Momoa) and his daughter Rachel (Isabela Merced) as they aim to track down and kill the people they believe were responsible for the death of Ray’s wife – who passed away after a potentially live-saving drug was suspiciously pulled from the market.
And the film also includes a major twist in its final act – so if you were left scratching your head a little by the end of the film, we’ve unpacked the final moments below.
Read on for everything you need to know about the ending of Sweet Girl, but be aware that there are obviously big spoilers ahead. (For our verdict on the movie, you can also read our Sweet Girl review.)
Sweet Girl ending explained
For most of the film’s runtime, it seems that Ray and Rachel Cooper are working together to get revenge for the death of their wife and mother – but roughly 80 minutes in, an outlandish twist reveals that not to be the case.
During a stand-off with an FBI agent atop a building, it is revealed that Rachel is actually working alone – and that her father had been killed two years earlier in the same incident that had led to the death of a VICE journalist towards the beginning of the film
Every time we’d seen Ray since the “24 months later” time jump, then, it had actually been Rachel: in other words, yes, it was her who had killed Simon Keeley and Shah, and her who had the face-to-face meeting with the hitman at the diner.
We’re left to presume that any dialogue between Rachel and Ray was imagined, although confusingly there’s also a hint that Rachel genuinely believes that she had become her father: hence why she is frequently urged to “say her name.”
Anyway, rather than run the risk of being caught, Rachel elects to jump off the building into a river (we’d already seen this scene at the very beginning, albeit with Ray jumping rather than Rachel) and ends up being placed in an ambulance after sustaining some injuries.
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But Rachel is not done yet and takes control of the ambulance, causing it to crash and escaping so she can travel to Pittsburgh and complete the final stop on her revenge tour (via another short conversation with her imaginary dead father).
Here she attends a rally for politician Diana Morgan, whose corruption was a large reason for her mother being denied treatment while she was ill (and whose catchphrase “clean out the rot” presumably bears deliberate similarity to Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp”).
Anyway, the hitman from earlier in the film is also in the crowd, as he’d promised, but Rachel is able to see him off by stabbing him to death in a fountain, before she then goes on to find Morgan in her office.
There, she manages to force Morgan into a confession as to her hand in the BioPrime conspiracy, revealing that she took a bribe and ordered the hit on the VICE journalist that led to Ray’s death.
It briefly looks like Rachel is going to slit Morgan’s throat, but instead, she sends a recording of the confession to the FBI, applies some make-up, and escapes on a plane – traveling to a place where she had happy memories with her late mother and father, while Morgan is arrested.