How Does 'The Groomer' End?

Just finished 'The Groomer' last night, and that ending hit like a truck. The protagonist finally corners the villain in an abandoned warehouse after tracking him through a series of gruesome clues. There's this intense hand-to-hand fight where both characters are bleeding badly, but the protagonist manages to impale the groomer on his own torture tools. The twist comes when we see the protagonist start adopting some of the groomer's mannerisms in the final scene, hinting he might be becoming what he hunted. The last shot shows him staring at a photo of a new potential victim with this unsettling smile. It's one of those endings that lingers in your mind for days.

If you like psychological thrillers with ambiguous endings, check out 'The Silent Patient'—it plays with similar themes of sanity and obsession.

The climax of 'The Groomer' is a masterpiece of psychological tension. After months of cat-and-mouse games, the detective protagonist discovers the groomer's hideout beneath a seemingly normal suburban home. The final confrontation isn't just physical—it's a battle of ideologies. The groomer monologues about society being the real monster while strapping the detective into one of his own torture devices. At the last second, the detective uses the groomer's obsession with 'perfect victims' against him, triggering a hidden fail-safe that crushes the villain.

What makes the ending extraordinary is the aftermath. Instead of a clean resolution, we get a time jump showing the detective suffering from severe PTSD. He burns all the case files, but in the final frames, we see him keeping one victim's file as a 'souvenir.' The implication that hunting monsters might create new ones is chilling. The cinematography uses this amazing contrast between warm childhood flashbacks and cold present-day scenes to drive home the theme.

For those fascinated by moral ambiguity in thrillers, 'Gone Girl' explores similar territory with its unreliable narrators. The way 'The Groomer' leaves certain elements open to interpretation makes it prime for book club discussions—our group argued for hours about whether the protagonist was always compromised or if the case changed him.

That ending messed me up in the best way. The groomer gets exposed publicly when his livestream gets hacked by the journalist protagonist. Instead of a typical arrest scene, it becomes this chaotic media frenzy where the groomer smiles directly into cameras while authorities drag him away. The real gut punch comes in the epilogue: a year later, the journalist finds evidence suggesting the groomer had an accomplice the whole time.

The brilliance lies in what's not shown. We never see the accomplice's face, just their hands arranging photos in the same distinctive pattern the groomer used. It suggests the cycle continues, which is way scarier than a clean resolution. The book's structure mirrors this—early chapters have neat endings for each victim's story, but the final chapters become fragmented and unresolved.

If you enjoy unsettling open endings, 'I'm Thinking of Ending Things' has a similar vibe of creeping dread that lingers after the last page. What makes 'The Groomer' stand out is how it critiques true crime sensationalism while being part of the genre itself—that meta layer adds so much depth.