Unfairly Forgotten, 70s Crime Thriller Is A Movie You Won’t Be Able To Stop Thinking About

By Robert Scucci
| Published 30 seconds ago

I’ve grown super cynical about modern murder mysteries. I think it’s because franchises like Law & Order and NCIS are cozy watches, but also catnip for boomers. I’ve gotten to the point where I can size up the week’s mystery seconds after the suspects are introduced, then spend the rest of the episode waiting to be proven right, which isn’t exactly a satisfying experience. But every so often, I stumble upon a movie like End Play, an Australian thriller that starts with a murder and then gets so weird you have no idea who you’re supposed to be rooting for.

Seriously, this movie is baffling in the best kind of way, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I watched it over the weekend. It’s about two brothers: one who seems dead to rights after killing a young female hitchhiker, and his wheelchair-bound brother, who’s also an archery expert living in solitude. They both have the hots for their half-cousin, and their relationship is adversarial to say the least. Both act like they know something the other doesn’t, and then the police get involved, acting like they know something the brothers don’t.

If there’s one takeaway I have after watching End Play, it’s that it’s a beyond-solid whodunit that will make you feel incredibly stupid by the time it concludes.

It’s Gotta Be Mark, Right? … Right?! 

End Play kicks off with Mark Gifford (John Waters, but not THAT one) picking up an attractive hitchhiker named Janine Talbot (Delvene Delaney) on the way to visit his wheelchair-bound brother Robert (George Mallaby). The next time we see Janine, she’s dead, sitting on Robert’s couch while Robert is out for the day, and Mark is scrambling to cover it up. He accidentally spills her perfume on the floor, leaving behind an obvious cleaning mark and lingering odor, and does such a sloppy job that anybody would assume he’s the killer, including Robert.

Using one of Robert’s spare wheelchairs, Mark sits Janine upright and wheels her across town to a movie theater, propping her head up with a neck brace. He’s also wearing a ridiculous wig so nobody notices it’s him wheeling around a corpse. He leaves her body at the theater and heads back home, ready to move on with his life.

Robert is immediately suspicious, and we quickly learn how the two brothers operate. There’s some sort of deep-seated animosity they’ve been carrying around for years, and things only get worse when Superintendent Cheadle (Ken Goodlet) and Sergeant Robinson (Robert Hewett) begin to suspect foul play. The language Robert and Mark use with each other carries the assumption of the other brother’s guilt, and both tiptoe around the fact that Janine was alive just hours earlier before turning up dead in Robert’s house. Nobody talks straight to each other, but rather in code, as if it were some form of psychological warfare. 

They go about their lives as normal, playing cards and drinking with their half-cousin Margaret (Belinda Giblin), whom they’re both romantically fixated on. The officers find it suspicious that a string of disappearances coincides with Mark’s visits to Robert, but they don’t really have any hard evidence to go on. What they do know, however, is that Janine was last seen at a movie theater with somebody using a wheelchair, and Robert happens to own two of them.

You’ll Be Surprised Whodunit 

End Play does an excellent job messing with your perception because we get such a fractured view of events. We see Mark pick up a hitchhiker and then clean up the scene before disposing of her body. We see Mark, in so many words, confess guilt to Robert, whose stone-faced expression never stops sizing him up. We see Robert remain tight-lipped about Mark’s whereabouts to the police, as if he knows something nobody else does. And we have the police, who seem completely certain they know the culprit, but are simply waiting for one of the brothers to confess because they’re only working with circumstantial evidence.

But we only see what Mark sees when he sees it, and the same could be said for everybody else. It’s up to you to figure out what really happened to Janine and the alleged victims who came before her, all of whom disappeared around the same time Mark and Robert reunited. Nothing makes sense until it suddenly does, and even then, the motives are never 100 percent clear. You’ll be thinking about this one for a while. At least, I know I will be.

As of this writing, you can stream End Play for free on Tubi.