If you just saw Wounds you might feel a little confused or disappointed. You think what the heck did I just watch? This movie had no story, was pointless and hollow. So let’s take a look at what the film really was all about. 

The Story

Will is a bartender and has a girlfriend Carrie. But he feels attracted to a regular customer named Alicia who also has a boyfriend. Will’s life isn’t bad as long as he has something to drink. But when a group of students come in, a fight starts and one of them leaves their phone, things take a sinister turn. Will bring home the phone to eventually give it back, but then, a strange and occult message appears, dragging Will down into madness and nightmares. 

Read the full review of Wounds, here.

The Emptiness inside of Will

You might feel the film is empty, but that’s just the case with bartender Will. It’s what his girlfriend Carrie says to him: ‘You are a fake person, empty inside.’

Well, that emptiness he is trying to fill with loads of alcohol, all day long so he doesn’t get drunk, but has a buzz all the time. It fills him up, just like his meaningless relationship with Carie with no emotional or physical deep bond. He thinks he has this special connection with Alicia, but she thinks otherwise.  Although he tries to lure her away from her boyfriend, she keeps rejecting him, while he doesn’t accept it, meanwhile staying with his own girlfriend.

Will as the empty vessel

But this is all going to change when a group of students enters his bar. Just before hot-headed Eric gets into a mean fight and gets his face cut open real bad. Coincidental just after the arrival of these students? Just as coincidental as one of them leaving her cell phone? Which Will picks up and takes home with him.  

Will then discovers by access of the cell phone that the students performed a ritual from a book called ‘Translations of Wounds’. By the means of a sacrifice and a wound you can make contact with other higher beings beyond our dimension. So that you can become powerful and enlightened. But their ritual went wrong. Maybe because they were not perfect hosts for possession of this beings. Will, unfortunately is. He is as empty as a human can be. Handsome and charming on the outside, but empty, meaningless on the inside, drifting through life with no purpose, he is a perfect vessel. 

The wound as a portal

Through surreal and horrific images the being is infesting Will’s mind, and creeps into our world, while Carrie has her own dealings with this hellish nightmare. Staring at the computer screen into a black hole, what is in fact the portal, she gets lost. Will however, manages to get her mind clean in a bath full of water, which transforms the water into black goo.

While the students don’t know what they summoned, and maybe that is why things went wrong as they say, Will now purposely knows what he is doing. After breaking up with Carrie, losing Alicia, and wanting to quit his job, he has nothing left but the bottle. And there is a whole empty body to fill. 

With Eric as his sacrifice, with a big wound on his face that turns into a portal to another dimension we see the being crawling out of the wound and into Will’s mouth just before the screen is filled with cockroaches and the screen turns black. 

Filling the emptiness with purpose

Wounds is a story about feeling empty, with no purpose in the world. We all want to find a meaning to our lives, why we are here. We all want to connect with something and someone. When Will is unable to do that, because of his own shallowness, there might be something else entirely that can give meaning to his life. 

It is a great example of a weird fiction story. It’s a story that connects the main character with the plot in a philosophical way, telling us in images, feelings, an intense atmosphere, and little dialogue what we should make of this story. 

Read more about Wounds:

• Wounds (2019) review

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