Nobody can agree on what happens at the end of American Psycho
Twenty-five years on, American Psycho is still sparking the same argument: did Patrick Bateman actually kill all those people, or was it all in his head?
The film hands you clues for both readings and then flatly refuses to settle it. Here's why nobody can agree — and what the people who made it have said.
Spoilers, obviously.
What actually happens at the end
After a blood-soaked night, Bateman (Christian Bale) leaves a rambling confession on his lawyer's answering machine. Then the ground shifts.
He returns to the apartment where he'd dumped bodies to find it spotless and up for sale, with an estate agent who's never heard of any murders.
At a bar, his lawyer, Harold Carnes, mistakes him for someone else, treats the confession as a hilarious joke, calls Bateman far too feeble to kill anyone — and insists he had dinner in London with Paul Allen (Paul Owen in the novel), the colleague Bateman is certain he axed to death.
Bateman's closing narration admits there's no catharsis and no punishment. The confession, he tells us, has meant nothing.
The two camps
Two readings, neither of which the film rules out:
- It all happened — the people around Bateman are so vain and interchangeable that they can't keep track of who's who. Mistaken identity runs through the whole film, so a lawyer confusing the dead Paul Allen for someone alive is just more of the same.
- It was in his head — Paul is alive in London, the apartment was never a crime scene, and Bateman's grip on reality visibly frays. The tip-off moment: an ATM that flashes "Feed me a stray cat," after which he shoots a police car and it bursts into flames.
What the director says
Mary Harron has always refused to give a straight answer. Asked directly whether it was all in Bateman's head, she paraphrased Quentin Tarantino — tell you, and she takes the movie away from you. But she's also called the final scene a failure on her part, saying she got the emphasis wrong and left too many people thinking it was a dream:
"As far as I'm concerned, it's not." — Mary Harron
Co-writer Guinevere Turner has said she and Harron actively hated "it was all a dream" twists, and made "a really conscious effort to have it be real" — the heightened reality meant to signal Bateman's warping point of view, not that he isn't killing.
What the author thinks
Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote the 1991 novel, has never been wild about the film, arguing the book is unadaptable because it lives inside Bateman's consciousness.
To him the question is almost beside the point: he's said "we've already seen him kill people," so a late crisis of memory changes nothing.
A new version has been circling — Lionsgate confirmed a remake in late 2024, with Luca Guadagnino in talks to direct and Scott Z. Burns writing.