WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS
Typically, home-invasion thrillers have simple endings. The good guys win, or they don’t. Either way works. But Push, which is a home-invasion thriller for most of its 90-minute runtime, doesn’t have a simple ending, at least not in its implications. The Shudder movie from David Charbonier and Justin Powell uses its final moments, including a post-credits scene, to retroactively play with the movie’s genre and the audience’s expectations. It doesn’t all work especially well, but it’s a daring ploy for such a lean, mean thriller.
There’s a fair bit to go over here, which is surprising given how straightforward so much of this movie seems. But those are always the fun ones to talk about, so let’s do that, potentially at length.
The Gist Of It
To understand some of the more complicated ideas it’s important to understand the simple ones, so here they are. Push revolves around a realtor named Natalie who is heavily pregnant with the son of her late partner, who was recently killed in a nasty car crash. Still nursing this trauma, Natalie is hosting an open house for a lavish, expansive property built in the 1890s that has some requisite spooky history. She’s determined to sell it at all costs, even though whatever went on there has generally scared away any potential buyers.
These are all the hallmarks of your usual horror-thriller. Vulnerable – mentally and physically – but determined protagonist? Check. Big, rattling house full of hidden terrors and secrets? Check. A villain who means our protagonist nothing but ill for initially obscure reasons? Bingo.
Pretty soon, a potential buyer credited only as “The Client” shows up and starts behaving in a deeply creepy way, roaming around the house as if he owns it already and talking about how the history should be factored into Natalie’s assessment, whatever her personal beliefs about the supernatural might be. All of this will ultimately become important to Push’s ending.
The House
Push combines the typical home-invasion suspense with unexpected haunted-house flourishes, giving the movie a vaguely supernatural vibe even though it refrains from outright supernaturalism throughout most of its runtime. This is essential to the movie’s highly effective atmosphere and also to its bigger plot ideas, since by the end, we’re very much supposed to consider the possibility that the house really is haunted.
Precisely what happened in the house is a little unclear. At some point, the previous owners were murdered on the property. The Client seems to have intimate knowledge of this, and he suggests to Natalie that it’s perhaps the reason why nobody but him showed up for the open house. However, it’s later revealed that he had all of the advertising signs for it stashed in the back of his car, so the movie goes out of its way to downplay any supernatural implications, even though it spends a lot of time during the suspense sequences using the typical tricks of the supernatural horror trade.
After Natalie escapes the house and grievously wounds The Client by stabbing him in the abdomen and pushing him out of a window, then later shooting him with a shotgun, she gets given a brief rundown by the police on who he really is. In brief, he’s an escaped patient from a high-security psych ward who claims to have some kind of deep spiritual connection to the house, and he’s certain that as long as it remains standing, he will, through some kind of dark power, remain alive.
Alicia Sanz in Push | Image via Shudder
Who is The Client, Really?
The Client claims to be Gabriel Marquez, the son of the original owners. This theory is reinforced by an earlier scene in which, while pursuing Natalie, he passes by the graves of his supposed parents and angrily spits on them. This lends some credence to the claim, since there’s no reason for him to do this if he doesn’t truly believe himself to be Gabriel. There’s nobody else in the scene, so he isn’t proving a point to an onlooker. It’s an authentic reaction.
This doesn’t mean that the Client is Gabriel, of course, just that he believes himself to be. The cops and Natalie are sceptical since if the claim were true, he’d be in his 60s, which he clearly isn’t. But there’s also a clear point made that he should have died from his injuries. This is the first time that Push seriously floats the idea that the Client is something more than human.
Even though she doesn’t necessarily believe what she has been told, Natalie is still unsure about leaving the Client alive, especially with her newborn son – whom she gave birth to in heroic fashion, standing in a graveyard without making any noise whatsoever – recuperating in the hospital ICU. So, Natalie pulls the fire alarm – we don’t see her do this, but we see her thinking about it beforehand – and tries to get the drop on the Client with a stolen scalpel, but when she gets to his room, she finds the cops guarding him dead. The Client has already broken free and begins to pursue Natalie through the hospital.
The Post-Credits Scene Confirms A Supernatural Element
Eventually, Natalie is able to outwit and overpower the Client, manically stabbing him to death – or so she thinks – with the scalpel. It’s a ferociously violent scene, and seemingly puts paid to the idea of the Client as an immortal demon. Push ends there, which is to say it rolls credits.
But there’s a post-credits scene that reveals that The Client once again survived. Given the savagery with which Natalie hacked him to bits, there’s simply no way this could be the case if he wasn’t supernaturally embellished. The Client’s resurrection also causes flickering in the hospital lights that is mirrored by flickering lights back at the house, proving that he is in some way connected to the property.
But is he Gabriel Marquez? It’s difficult to say. We have no real context for why, if he were Gabriel, he’d be angry enough at his parents to reflexively spit on their graves. The implication, I think, is that they were abusive to him, and he killed them. Whether the Client is the original Gabriel who has somehow stopped ageing, or someone else – perhaps a readily available host – embodying Gabriel’s wayward spirit is unclear. But there’s definitely something amiss, and Push clearly wants you to wonder what it might be without giving you a concrete answer.