WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Wounds, now streaming on Netflix.
For the most part, Wounds plays out like psychological horror, with Armie Hammer's Will thinking he's going mad after recovering a lost cell phone in the aftermath of a fight in the bar where he works. He realizes it's the key to a demonic portal that brings terror and pain to those who possess it, which is made all the more worse when his girlfriend, Carrie (Dakota Johnson), nearly goes insane when she tries to discover where the portal leads.
Will ends up at his friend's home above the bar, and looks into the health of Eric (Brad William Henke), the man who started the brawl. He then realizes what he must do to truly get rid of the supernatural entity haunting him.
THE GATEWAY HAS BEEN OPENED
Will and Carrie find images of rituals and corpses on the phone, and they call the previous owner, Garrett, they inadvertently open the gateway. Carrie becomes obsessed when the phone sends her to a literal portal online, but Will snaps her out of it, as he sees she's losing herself to it, not sleeping and or even using the bathroom. Despite Will's efforts, the ordeal takes a toll on their relationship, and they split up, leaving him depressed, drunk and uncertain of what's real.
But having lost the phone earlier when he hallucinated cockroaches in his car, Will thinks he could truly be free from the malevolent force triggering visions of bodily harm and death. However, he's still seeing roaches, and, when Carrie kicks him out, he heads to Eric's apartment in hopes of a temporary place to crash.
There, he tends to Eric, who received a nasty gash on his face during the bar fight in the first act. He's been absent from the film since then, but when Will sees the wound, he starts to think coming here was more than mere coincidence. When Eric shockingly presents the lost phone, Will discovers he's been manipulated by the entity to show up at the apartment.
WHAT'S THE WOUND ABOUT?
Will is triggered by the wound after seeing the phone, with a sinister, killer look evolving in his eye, almost as if he's possessed. Eric reveals the strange voice on the phone, which sounded like static to Will, told him to lure Will. The entity pushed Carrie over the edge and drove her to break up with Will, knowing he would end up at Eric's apartment. As part of its plan, the entity possessed one of the kids from the bar earlier on to find the device and send it to Eric so he could gift it to Will.
Naturally, Will is stunned, because he recalls the clues and photos on the phone about demonic rituals drove his investigation into the "Ritual of Wounds," a Gnostic practice that teaches open wounds can allow humans to transcend to a higher plane and interact with, or become possessed by, godlike demons. These wounds are portals, sucking in humans' life essence and replacing it with that of this demonic figure.
Will doesn't fight it any longer, because he realizes the quickest way to get rid of the entity is to embrace it. He simply doesn't want to go on living, as he's a deadbeat who dropped out of college, got fired from his job and lost the girl of his dreams. In short, he has nothing to live for and here, at his lowest point, the phone is a sign he should commit a form of suicide. Eric doesn't know any of that, however, and with Will accepting it's time to end it, he pounces on Eric and sucks the demon out of his facial wound. Hundreds of roaches start flying out, and Will consumes the demon, allowing it to own his body, while Eric screams in agony, seemingly dying as roaches cover the screen.
Written and directed by Babak Anvari, Netflix's Wounds stars Armie Hammer, Dakota Johnson and Zazie Beetz. The film is now available to stream.