WARNING: The following contains spoilers for I Care a Lot, now available on Netflix.
Part of Netflix's massive 2021 film slate, the wildly popular black comedy, I Care a Lot, is a fun thrill ride that has a twisted ending. While Marla (Rosamund Pike) lived like a self-proclaimed lioness in a jungle, it's fair game that she ended up just another casualty of the food chain at the hands of one of her victim's.
Marla ran a heartless scheme by convincing judges to grant her legal guardianship over unsuspecting elderly people who she claimed were no longer capable of taking care of themselves. She then cut her clients off from the outside world by putting them into nursing homes and bleeding them dry of all of their assets. However, when Marla's next victim is the mother of a former Russian mob boss, she gets pulled into a dangerous game.
Mob boss Roman (Peter Dinklage) surprisingly meets his match in Marla, who escapes his assassination attempt and beats him at his own game. Marla kidnaps Roman and leaves him naked on the road. Since he has no paper trail as a mobster, a judge appoints this "John Doe" under the guardianship of Marla. She visits him in the hospital, ready to give him one last chance to pay her off in return for his mother's freedom. Roman, just as savvy and amoral of a businessman as Marla, instead offers her a chance to go into business with him.
In a twist, the two realize they would be much better off as allies than enemies, especially since they could make a fortune. Roman proposes the idea that they take Marla's brilliant grift national with his business connections. They create a country-wide guardian corporation, with Marla as CEO, thus cornering the market on elderly care. Their corporation included 80 different "arms," such as a training sect and a pharmaceutical sect, and they are all registered offshore, charging each other fake invoices for Marla and Roman to collect the profit from.
In the final montage, Marla is interviewed by a news reporter on her immense success, while snippets of her operation are shown. The cutthroat nature of her capitalistic endeavor is temporarily forgotten as the film at least demands some praise for Marla's cunning skills.
The twist appears to be that Marla finally achieves her goal of becoming rich, but just as she steps out of the news building, a disgruntled man from her past approaches. He is the son of the old woman Marla isolated in a nursing home when the film first introduced her scheme. He was also introduced at the hearing as a violent man, reaching a breaking point because Marla kept him from seeing his mother.
The pieces fall into place as the man pulls out a gun and shoots Marla, shouting his mother died in the nursing home without him getting to see her. Marla's blood drenches her white suit, and she dies in the arms of her girlfriend, Fran. The cold and brutal game Marla ran on her clients eventually came back to collect its price. Marla may not have cared about the people she imprisoned in nursing homes, but their loved ones cared a lot.
As senseless as the atrocities Marla and Roman commit, the same unfeeling violence is returned upon them. I Care a Lot reminds viewers that getting rich by any means in a toxic world also means that one can get cut down in the same savage world they created. It doesn't seem like much of a shock as it does a twist of fate; however, audiences could have also expected Marla's death, since it would have been unlikely that I Care a Lot didn't bury its gays, stripping Marla and Fran of a happy ending after they scammed countless elderly people.
I Care a Lot, starring Rosamund Pike, Peter Dinklage, Eiza González, Chris Messina, Macon Blair, Alicia Witt, Nicholas Logan, Damian Young, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Dianne Wiest, is now streaming on Netflix.