Movies News Talk
To really understand a movie like The Fearway, you need to dig into the symbols throughout the film. The ending reveals just how important they are.
At the start of the movie, an injured woman (Robin Bookhout) buries a pair of coins in the sand. Coins show up again when the Waitress (Jessica Gray) gives Sarah and Michael some for the jukebox at the diner. While the movie doesn't say what the coins are for, it's clear they have symbolic meaning. The audience eventually learns that everything around the couple is outside of reality.
Coins have been connected to death in many cultures. Ancient Greek mythology said you needed to be buried with coins to go to the other side. According to Navy Times, a dead person needed to take coins to the underworld to pay the ferryman of the River Styx. The river separated the land of the living from the land of the dead. A dead person couldn't cross until they paid.
In The Fearway, the coins could be seen as the fare for Sarah and Michael when they're ready to move on.
Like most Time Loop Movies, Michael and Sarah try to escape their situation by changing their usual path. They ignore the sudden impact, drive past the diner, and even outrun the mysterious black car that haunts them.
Even though they seem to break the chain of events, they haven't gone anywhere. They even find their own car smashed when they start walking. The couple sees their car smashed because they're witnessing the scene of the accident that killed them and put them in the time loop in the first place.
What made The Fearway more than just a simple Time Loop Movie and into a true horror experience was the mysterious man (Briahn Auguillard) with his sharp teeth and scary eyes. Besides his creepy look, the character, credited as Ferryman, is much more important to the story than just the movie's monster. Since the twist ending revealed the actual fate of Sarah and Michael, it helped Ferryman make more sense, especially when you think about the coins from earlier in the movie.
The monster is likely the ancient Greek mythological figure known as Charon, who was tasked with taking souls across the River Styx into the underworld. Charon has a price, which explains why Sarah and Michael were given coins to pay him. Unlike other depictions of the afterlife that show the underworld as a huge abyss, The Fearway shows it as a kind of purgatory, with Charon as a creepy monster instead of just a boatman.
Time loops in movies have been a clever way to tell stories for decades. The Fearway makes it scarier by setting the loop on a deserted stretch of desert highway. Michael and Sarah experience the same things over and over. These events are actually the imagined continuation of their journey if they hadn't gotten in the car crash that killed them.
They feel a thud, see a mysterious ice patch on the road, and eventually get to the diner. The thud could be the crash itself, and the ice patch is probably what caused it. The figures at the diner are the other mythical beings who take souls to the other side, and they help Ferryman (Charon) with his job of taking souls into the afterlife. The time loop is inescapable because the pair are stuck in limbo and can't move on because they haven't paid Charon for the trip. The Waitress tries to speed things up by giving them the coins, but like the other woman with the injured hand, Michael and Sarah haven't accepted their fate.
Even though they're really active in the entire movie, which is less than 90 minutes long, Michael and Sarah are actually dead the whole time and don't live to see the end of the movie. While this twist has been done a lot in better movies, The Fearway doesn't waste its twist because it makes its own story symbolic by having the characters in limbo.
While Sarah and Michael don't live, it's possible that realizing they are actually dead could help them accept their fate and finally move on. Even though the Ferryman is scary, he's their only hope of escaping the loop.
With ancient Greek myth, purgatory, and even a time loop to work with, The Fearway has much deeper ideas than the usual cheap Horror Movies found on free streaming services. The ending is a twist, but there's also an unavoidable aspect to it that makes the themes throughout the story make even more sense. In an earlier scene, Michael thinks that the Ferryman is the Grim Reaper, which is partly right. While the movie doesn't spoil its own twist ending, it does give enough hints that it's not really a surprise.
In the end, The Fearway is about acceptance, especially the acceptance of death. What seemed sinister at first takes on a comforting aspect as the true intentions of the people at the diner and the Ferryman are finally revealed. Like death itself, the Ferryman is scary, but the ending of The Fearway makes it clear that the only way to get through the challenge is for the heroes to accept that their time has finally come.
Time loop movies often end with a lesson for the main character – whether it's horror or not. They repeat the same day or the same event until they learn something about themselves. In something like Groundhog Day, they learn to be less selfish. In When We First Met, the lesson is to not force a relationship that's not right. The lessons are different. The key to breaking loops in any of these movies, however, is acceptance.
That's true in The Fearway as well. The acceptance here, however, isn't about finding the right partner or learning from past mistakes. Instead, it's accepting that life as the main characters know it is over. There are other time loop movies that have a similar idea, and interestingly, one that does it well isn't in the horror genre, but is instead the young adult drama Before I Fall.
The drama shows a young woman repeating the same day over and over, learning to be a better person as she stands up for people who are bullied and makes amends with friends she's not close to anymore. She changes her life during her time loop, but ultimately accepts that it's her time to die at the end of it. It's less of a thriller like The Fearway, but it accomplishes many of the same things as the teenager faces her fears and accepts what's coming.
The lesson in movies like The Fearway is that whatever the main characters are avoiding, whether it's growing up, love, or death, is going to catch up with them eventually.