Ivo van Hove’s A Little Life and the new movie Cobweb share an ending.

Both conclude with monologues that explain how the story just told will influence the rest of the characters’ lives, explanations that double as descriptions of how the production and the movie may impact their audiences post-viewing.

After enduring four hours of A Little Life, the audience is liable to be grasping for any takeaways to justify its unceasing suffering (a human impulse that the story arguably challenges). Jude’s adopted father ultimately faces this same quagmire, and his answer — expressed in the aforementioned monologue — feels as directed at the audience as at himself, as evidenced by how Ivo blocks the speech to break the fourth-wall for the first time; while talking, the actor walks into the auditorium, thereby adopting our seat-bound vantage point on the action, as he details his own vantage point on what we’ve just seen.

Again, A Little Life itself may not completely co-sign his tidy resolution, but he uses Jude’s saga as a reminder that anyone he encounters on the daily might posses similar demons from their past. Everyone we meet could be a Jude, and as such, we should treat them with grace, forgiving harmful behavior that wouldn’t be as confusing with unattainable total knowledge.

Cobweb’s concluding monologue lacks this moralizing, but it similarly summarizes how the memory of the movie’s horrifying events will haunt the main character in perpetuity, a summary that also applies to how horror movies affect the audience’s nightly experience. The main character should be comforted by the fact that the source of his horror has been ostensibly eradicated, paralleling how the audience ostensibly need not worry about a movie’s horror stretching beyond the closing credits.

But we all know that’s not how it works. The horrifier might be gone — emphasis on might — but the effects of the horror remain. The monologue asks: will the main character ever sleep well again, or will he be terrorized by his remembering?

And how about us? Every creak in the wall and bump in the night and movement in the shadows could mark the return of the horror, his and ours.