Who Is Involved At The End Of The Contract In His Obsession?

The end of the film hit me like a truck. It turns out the main character’s fixation with another was more about an attempt to control and the collapse of his attempt to get this managed through a contract. The other party walks off. The main character is left holding a bunch of stubbed-out dreams. There’s a moment where he laughs in apparent triumph, but his eyes are blank. And in the background, while the main character is making his ‘victory’ noise, the other characters are dealt their share of grief. There’s the bored-looking secretary incinerating files. The main character’s big rival is lurking in the background of a few shots, with a malevolent glint in his eye, but otherwise minding his own business as the main character’s world falls apart.
The soundtrack falls silent in the last 30 or so seconds of the film. Instead, we hear the scratch of a pen on paper, and then the pen rolls off the table it was on. It’s not about assigning blame for the main character’s obsession. It’s about who manages to pick up the pieces, and is left substantially unchanged by the whole event. None of them are unchanged.

Notice that the soundtrack disappears completely in the last 30 seconds of the film, where all we hear is the sound of silence plus a pen rolling off a desk. This film is not about who was involved and how, it’s about who is left standing when the dust has settled. Interestingly, none of the characters in this film are unscathed.

At the end of the contract, we see how every single person who has touched it has been warped by their own obsession. The protagonist’s family appears in the epilogue to find him gone from his chair, his wife’s wedding ring left on the table. They are just collateral damage to his downfall, but we see them clearly as silent observers to his self destruction. The antagonist may have won, but we see him in the post-credits scene frantically rewriting terms on a new contract. It is all just a cycle of behavior that no one can escape.

By the end of Contract it’s not quite clear who has been more ‘harmed’ by this person’s obsessive making of a contract with another. At first it seems to be the other person ‘contracted with’. But the more I watch this the more I realize that in fact both people are caught in this same spiral of obsessive behavior albeit in very different ways. His face is captured in close up many times as he relives each portion of the contract. The other character is also caught in his own version of obsession but in a colder and more calculating way. Both are equally ‘damaged’ by their experience of the other’s obsessive making of a contract.

I really like the symbolism of the last shot of the Contract. The Contract is being burnt but the two characters are still locked in a gaze in the glass. It’s a very open ending and doesn’t give any sense of closure but I think that’s kind of the point. Maybe the writer is trying to tell us that even though the Contract has been destroyed, the main character’s obsession will find another way to consume him. It’s not as intense or obvious as it was before but that doesn’t mean it won’t be just as destructive. In fact, it could be even worse. The idea sends shivers down my spine.