Accused ending spoilers follow.
The final shot of Chaneil Kular's new movie Accused is incredibly haunting.
Kular might not have reprised his role as Anwar in Sex Education's final season, but he's back on Netflix with this gripping story directed by Boiling Point's Philip Barantini.
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Accused is an intense near-real-time thriller that sees Harri mistaken as the suspect of a train bombing in London following a social-media witchhunt.
When two people take it upon themselves to track down Harri at his parents' house where he's dogsitting, Harri faces a fight to clear his name and to survive from the violent vigilante duo.
It all builds to a violent finale that ends on a powerful last shot, so let's dig into Accused's ending to explain all.
Major spoilers ahead if you haven't seen the movie yet.
Accused ending explained
After the two vigiliants, known only as Black Mask (Jay Johnson) and White Mask (Robbie O'Neill), break into his house and kill the family dog, Harri manages to escape their clutches and seek safety in his neighbour's house.
Unfortunately, Mrs Daly (Frances Tomelty) is a bit of a racist and she believes what she's hearing on the radio, namely that Harri is a terrorist. While she pretends to help him, she sends out a signal to his tormentors and Black Mask arrives.
It looks like Black Mask has the upper hand on Harri, but Harri manages to overpower the intruder and kills him with several blows from a nearby hammer. Harri leaves Mrs Daly's house and makes it to a car, only to take an unfortunately-timed rest as White Mask catches up with him.
White Mask starts to livestream his vengeance against Harri, trying to force him to apologise for what he (didn't) do. White Mask is happy to let Harri try to run away and Harri heads to the treehouse in his parents' garden, which we saw earlier in the movie was a bit rundown.
This is to White Mask's disadvantage, as he tracks Harri into the treehouse only to fall through the rotten floorboards and become impaled. As Harri leaves, White Mask begs him to not leave him to die, but Harri just walks away.
Accused then cuts to a news report where it's revealed that the bomber was actually a 28-year-old white man called Paul Lock. Unlike the reports about the Harri accusations, the news report is filled with people calling Paul "harmless and a kind, gentle soul".
It's an obvious dig at the racial-bias theme of the movie, how Harri 'looked like' an obvious terrorist and the actual terrorist couldn't possibly be Paul because his school teachers "couldn't ever imagine Paul acting like this".
A week later, we see Harri being interviewed by a reporter (Kimberley Marren, who the movie is dedicated to) who asks him: "A lot of people will have assumed that your life has gone back to normal, so to start, I want to know how you feel about that?"
We don't get to see Harri's response, but it's obvious that his life can't possibly go back to normal as we see him anxious over a buzzing phone notification, a throwback to the string of notifications that came in when he was accused online of being a bomber.
While we see all of the anonymous people who accused Harri delete their tweets and posts about him, it won't be so easy for Harri to just delete the traumatic experience that resulted from the online witchhunt.
Accused is available to watch now on Netflix in the UK and Ireland.
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Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
