'The Tutor' Ending Explained: What Happened to Ethan? (2024)

Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for The Tutor.

At first, Jordan Ross' The Tutor seems to be a pretty straightforward movie about a teacher stalked by a particularly problematic student. With a baby on the way and a career that isn't exactly one of the most well-paid, Ethan (Garrett Hedlund) jumps at the opportunity of spending a whole week getting young Jackson Platt (Noah Schnapp) ready for his SATs for the whopping amount of $2,500 a day. What he doesn't know is that Jackson is the most insufferable rich kid that he will ever tutor — which is saying something, considering that Ethan's stories involve him getting hit by flying books and being called "white trash." Throughout his time at Jackson's mansion, Ethan is repeatedly humiliated through methods that range from strange conversations about parenthood to obscene offers of money. But it's when he finds pictures of himself just living his life in Jackson's computer that it becomes clear that Ethan doesn't have just a poorly mannered student in his hands, but a stalker, and an angry one at that. What has he done to invite such anger? Well, nothing really. Or, at least, that's what the movie — and Ethan — wants you to believe.

As is usually the case with psychological thrillers, good or bad, things in The Tutor aren't exactly what they seem. Ethan and Jackson have a past, one that involves an affair and a murder disguised as a suicide. As the movie reveals to us in its final 40 minutes, when Jackson was just a little kid, Ethan had a fling with his mother, Rachel. The relationship, however, did not end well. Rachel was found dead in the water near the family's lake house, and, though Ethan claims that she took her own life, the police found no water in her lungs. To make matters worse, the autopsy also revealed that she was pregnant. In possession of this information, Jackson believes that Ethan was the one responsible for his mother's death and will stop at nothing to get his revenge. But are Jackson's suspicions correct? And does he manage to get back at Ethan? These questions are at the crux of The Tutor's ending, and some of their answers aren't as simple as one might believe...

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Did Ethan Actually Kill Rachel?

Ethan's problems begin for real after a fateful dinner with his pregnant girlfriend, Annie (Victoria Justice), and a couple of friends at a restaurant. While talking about his new ill-tempered, kind of psychotic student, he's surprised by the presence of Jackson, who has presumably walked all the way over to his table just to say hi. Seemingly offended by Ethan's opinion of him, Jackson amps up his obsession with the titular tutor, poisoning him with laced fruits and trying to drown him in the same lake in which Rachel died. He also takes pictures of an unconscious Ethan lying in bed with one of his teenage friends, gets the teacher fired from his job by blaming him for his self-inflicted leg wounds, and goes to the police to accuse him of assaulting him on the street. The final blow comes when he tells Annie that he's afraid she might turn up like Rachel, which prompts her to question Ethan about his past relationships.

Affected by Jackson's version of events and afraid of who her boyfriend has become, Annie kicks him out of the house. Now living in his car, Ethan tries to find a way to prove his innocence. He goes back to Jackson's house to find evidence of what has been done to him, only to find out that Jackson doesn't even live there: the mansion actually belongs to the parents of the girl he was photographed with. Arrested for trespassing and already facing charges for the wounds on Jackson's body, Ethan receives a phone call from his former student asking him to go to the exact place in which Rachel died.

This is where we get the first actual clue that Ethan might know more than what he's telling us. It's also where Jackson gets his first confirmation that his tutor did indeed kill his mother all those years ago, all because Ethan pops up precisely at the pier of the Platts' lake house. Since Rachel's body was found somewhere else in the lake and the police report was kept under wraps, only someone that had been with her when she died would know the exact spot where it happened.

Ethan tries to argue that he merely deduced the place in which Rachel jumped into the lake because he knew that the house belonged to the Platts, but Jackson is not having it. With the help of his cousin, Gavin (Jonny Weston), he beats Ethan up and tries to get him to confess that he killed Rachel. His trump card is the journal that his mother kept all throughout the affair, in which she wrote about her fear of Ethan and how disgusted he made her feel. He reads those passages to Ethan, who jumps up and attacks Gavin, killing him in the process, and blurts out what everyone already knows by this point: that he murdered Rachel by beating her head against the pier's wooden boards and threw her body in the lake.

Does Jackson Get Revenge on Ethan?

After killing Gavin, Ethan sets off to find Jackson, who picks up a conveniently hidden gun and hides himself underneath the boat house's grated floor. It's not a great idea, since Ethan has no trouble finding his ex-pupil. But just as he is hitting the grates in order to force Jackson out of his hiding place, Annie arrives. Due to a pregnancy-related agreement, Ethan shares his cell phone location non-stop with his girlfriend. So, when she sees him somewhere near the lake, which she now knows is where Rachel died, Annie goes after him. For a split second, Ethan tries to convince her that Jackson is the one to blame for everything that has happened, but she doesn't believe him. So, Ethan turns against her and threatens to kill her just like he did Rachel. At this point, however, Jackson comes out of hiding and shoots him in the back. Ethan's body falls into the lake, never to be found.

As Jackson and Annie wonder about whether or not Ethan is actually gone, the movie cuts to a scene that we have already seen before, right at the beginning, during a montage of Ethan's many pupils. In it, the teacher is talking to a woman that seems to be the mother of one of his students, saying that his method is all about connection. It is important, he explains, to understand that every kid has their own journey with their own unique reward at the end. This time, however, the scene ends with Ethan giving the audience a cynical smile.

There are two ways to interpret this scene. The first one is that it is just a callback to something that happened earlier in the story, an ironic moment in which Ethan is unknowingly talking about his own death. After all, that is the unique reward of Jackson's particular journey. The other possible interpretation is that the film actually begins at its end, framing the entire plot as a one-and-a-half hour long flashback. In that version of the story, Ethan survived and is free to keep on teaching and maybe taking some lives along the way. There is no way of knowing for certain what has happened to him. In the end, we are left as much in the dark as Annie and Jackson.