Basic Instinct: who is the killer? Forget the ice pick — freeze-frame the killer's arm in the first scene
Basic Instinct ends on a shot engineered to keep people arguing, and the argument has run for more than thirty years. The most-cited physical evidence isn't in that shot at all — it's in the first three minutes, and it only shows up if you stop the tape.
The final shot of Paul Verhoeven's 1992 thriller is designed to leave the question open, and it has worked for more than three decades. The people who think the question is already closed point at a completely different scene.
The film never names its killer in dialogue. It sets up two women, builds a case against each, lets one of them die, and then puts the murder weapon back in frame in the last few seconds. Joe Eszterhas sold the screenplay for a reported $3 million — a record at the time — and Verhoeven shot it in San Francisco through protests from gay and lesbian activist groups over the depiction of a bisexual murderer. He then trimmed roughly 40 seconds of the sex scenes to bring an NC-17 down to an R.
The arm in the opening scene
The film opens on retired rock star Johnny Boz in bed with a blonde woman whose face is kept out of frame throughout. She ties his hands above his head with a white silk scarf and kills him with an ice pick. The camera is careful about what it shows: the body, the hair, the hands, never the face.
Which is exactly why the freeze-frame crowd works on it.
The detail most often cited is the killer's left upper arm and her hands — a small mark on the arm and a French manicure that viewers match to Catherine Tramell in the sex scenes that come later in the film.
It's a fan argument rather than a filmmaker statement, and it has a counter. Beth Garner is a brunette, so a wig would be doing the work, and an anonymous body shot is not a confession. But it's the only physical evidence in the film that doesn't depend on who you believe.
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The case the film builds against Beth
Beth Garner, the police psychologist and Nick Curran's ex, is the film's official answer for about ten minutes:
- The Berkeley connection — Catherine says Beth knew her at university and became obsessed with her. Beth says Catherine slept with her once and then would not let go.
- The name — Catherine claims Beth once used the surname Garner as a married name, which Beth denies.
- Nilsen — the Internal Affairs investigator is shot with a .38, and a .38 is found at Beth's apartment.
- The apartment search — after Nick shoots her, police turn up a blonde wig, photographs of Catherine and further material tying her to the case.
Her last line to Nick is "I loved you," which the film puts in the middle of the evidence rather than after it.
The case the film builds against Catherine
Catherine Tramell, the novelist with a psychology degree, has the better motive and the worse alibi. Her book Love Hurts describes a rock star killed in bed with an ice pick, which she offers up as proof of her innocence on the grounds that nobody would be stupid enough to do it. Her previous partners have a habit of dying. And then there's the manuscript page.
While Nick is running to warn his partner Gus, he reads a page of Catherine's unfinished book describing the murder Gus is about to walk into — written before it happened.
Gus dies in a stairwell with an ice pick, moments later.
The last shot
Nick and Catherine end the film in bed, talking about a future neither of them believes in. The camera drifts down past the mattress to an ice pick lying on the floor underneath. Verhoeven's camera does not move again.
That is the closest the film comes to an answer, and it is deliberately not one — the pick is there, Catherine is there, and nothing is said. For the record: Basic Instinct 2, released in 2006 with Sharon Stone returning and Michael Caton-Jones directing, proceeds from the assumption that Catherine has been killing people all along. Nobody involved in the original ever had to confirm it.