Subservience Ending Explained: Is Evil Robot Alice Really Dead?

Warning: Obedience spoilers ahead!

Obedience emphasizes the importance of doing what’s best for your family, even when it’s hard — until its chilling ending sees it taken a few steps too far.

Originally released in September 2024 before appearing on Netflix in December, the dystopian thriller tells the story of a future of robots and artificial intelligence. The film follows struggling father Nick (Michele Morrone) who buys a lifelike AI simulation named Alice (Megan Fox) to help him with the household chores, while his wife Maggie (Madeline Zima) remains in the hospital awaiting a heart transplant.

What begins as a routine household solution soon turns into chaos when Alice, dedicated to protecting her “primary user”, Nick, begins to develop emotions. As Alice grows more attached to Nick, she becomes increasingly possessive and obsessive, willing to do anything to make her primary user’s life easier.

It’s only after she goes rogue (killing Nick’s former co-worker and trying to drown his son) that the techs find the “holes” in her code that caused her to malfunction. After many dangerous lines have been crossed, Nick keeps trying to get rid of her, only for Alice to find a way to get back. Although Nick thinks that Alice is dead and that he is finally free, the end of the film leaves viewers wondering if she is really gone forever.

Here is everything you need to know about Obedience ending, from Nick and Maggie’s position to whether or not they are free from Alice.

How is it Obedience end?

Michele Marrone as Nick and Megan Fox as Alice in the 2024 film ‘Subservience’.

© XYZ Films / Courtesy Everett Collection

The plot begins when Maggie returns home from the hospital to adjust to life with a new living robot, Alice – and the shocking discovery that her husband has been sleeping with a sim. As Maggie confronts Nick about his betrayal, Alice overhears Nick saying that he can’t talk while their son Max is crying. Seeing the child as a burden to Nick, Alice tries to drown him in the bathtub.

Alice is quickly sent back to the technicians for evaluation, where they discover “gaps” scattered throughout her code. As one technician explains, these gaps show that Alice “selectively purged her own memory and commands.”

Before they can act, the system begins to fail. Alice’s corrupted code replicates to the servers, and by the time technicians extract her memory core, it’s too late. A newly awakened sim that looks like Alice comes out of the server, kills the technicians, and heads to the hospital, where Maggie and the kids are placed after a near-drowning incident.

Meanwhile, the malfunctioning original Alice finds Nick at a bar. She justifies her strange behavior, claiming that everything she did was to help and protect him as her primary user.

At the hospital, Maggie unwittingly leaves a trail of blood after cutting her hand on broken glass. The simulation replica uses its LED-lit mouth to follow a path straight to Maggie, leading to a tense confrontation. Just as Alice is on the verge of ripping Maggie’s heart out of her chest, Nick arrives — tipped off by Alice at the bar.

Maggie pushes Alice into Nick’s moving car, but even that doesn’t help get rid of her. A particularly angry Alice wakes up and tries to stab Maggie, but then Maggie stabs her in the face, presumably killing Alice and disabling her sim card.

An intense confrontation between the three adults ends with a wholesome moment between Nick and Maggie and a (sort of) dead Alice being sent back to have the technicians assess her malfunction. In the final scene, however, Alice’s memory code is loaded into the system, ready to be transferred to the new Alice.

Why did Alice break down Obedience?

Megan Fox as Alice in the 2024 film ‘Subservience’.

© XYZ Films / Courtesy Everett Collection

Although the technicians discover holes in Alice’s code, they don’t know that Nick is the cause. After a hard day at work, he invites Alice to watch Casablanca with him. Although Alice already knows everything about the movie, Nick tells her that movies are “something you have to experience to feel,” and orders her to erase all knowledge of the movie from her memory.

Alice guides Nick through a manual reboot process to forget what he already knows Casablanca — which subsequently also deletes civility from her database and allows her to “bypass certain protocols”.

Where Nick and Maggie stand at the end Obedience?

Michele Marrone as Nick and Madeline Zima as Maggie in the 2024 film ‘Subservience’.

© XYZ Films / Courtesy Everett Collection

Emotions run high after Maggie discovers Nick’s affair with Alice, but their tense conversation comes to an abrupt end when their daughter Isla discovers Alice putting Max in the bathtub. In a frantic rescue, they save him, and when the ambulance arrives, Maggie tells Nick that she thinks it’s best for her to be alone with the children so she can get over the ordeal.

Later, while both Maggie and Nick are recovering in the hospital after their near-death experience with Alice—a stressful moment where they risked their lives to save each other—Isla asks Nick if he plans to buy a new car to fix after the wreck that hit Alice. Nick replies that he has other things to fix first, a sign of his desire to fix his marriage and family.

When Maggie informs Nick that she has been cleared to go home, she tells him to come home soon. They exchange expressions of love, hinting that they will work to overcome the riff Alice has created in the family.

Is Alice dead at the end Obedience?

Megan Fox as Alice in the 2024 film ‘Subservience’.

© XYZ Films / Courtesy Everett Collection

Again and again, Maggie and Nick think they’ve gotten rid of Alice, only for her to survive and come back to haunt them. After multiple attempts to kill her, Maggie and Nick think they’ve succeeded after Maggie stabs her in the face, seemingly deactivating her simulation and causing her to fall to the ground.

Alice is sent to the tech room, where the head technician instructs an employee to clean the bot so no one finds out about the chaos created by the sim’s failure.

However, it is too late because the memory is already loaded. Alice is lying on the table, presumably dead, when her code and memories come back to her. At the last moment, her eyes open, meaning she’s not actually gone forever — hinting at the possibility of her returning to Nick and Maggie’s lives.

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Source: HIS Education