This article was originally published on Mary 24, 2024. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is now available to rent or purchase through digital services. Warning: Spoilers ahead.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga has one of the bleakest, most twisted endings of any studio franchise movie in recent history. It’s also a little disgusting in a fantastical, body-horror kind of way. That it somehow also manages to bring the timeline of the film right up to the very beginning of Mad Max: Fury Road makes it that much more fascinating.
Here’s what we actually see at the end of the film: After Furiosa ( Anya Taylor-Joy ) overtakes Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) — the man who robbed her of her childhood, killed her mother, practically sold her into slavery, then killed the one other person she grew to love — she mulls how to finally end him. He insists that killing him would turn her into him. She then “takes away his voice” (presumably cuts off his tongue) and stands there with him, in silence, wondering what to do.
And then she turns him into a tree . More accurately, she plants him into the ground, alive, high up in the hydroponic gardens of the Citadel, with a peach tree growing out of his crotch. A living repository of human knowledge, the History Man (George Shevtsov) says in voice-over that Furiosa herself told him how she handled Dementus.
We then see Dementus: old, desiccated, but still alive, as much mulch as man. We then see a red ripe peach growing out of that tree — its first fruit. .
