Thieves on Netflix: We Explain the End of the Movie with Adele Exarchopoulos and Melanie Laurent

Warning, spoilers! This article reveals elements of the Thieves ending.

An ode to friendship and female solidarity, Thieves tells the story of three highly skilled robbers tasked with one final mission. After that, Carol (Melanie Laurent) wants to end everything and go back to normal life. Above all, she wants to become a mother – a risky desire in her situation.

In one of the last sequences of the film, the heroine meets the character of the godmother (Isabel Ajani), who is ready for the worst in order not to leave her protégé. Alex (Adele Exarchopoulos) manages to take him down, but BIS breaks into the building and Carol is trapped. In front of his helpless friend, he knows that this moment will mean the end of his life.

Everything points to the fact that Carol was killed. Sam (Manon Brache) sees the stretcher pass in front of her and realizes the tragedy. Alex, on the other hand, must now continue his journey without his faithful friend.

The epilogue takes place four years later. Sam finds Alex and asks her to come back with him on the mission. Next scene, they are on horseback in a dry desert and discover a house and a little girl under a typhus. Carol appears and hugs her lifelong friend. She finally achieved her dream: turned away, gave birth to a child and finally lived a peaceful life.

How did Carol survive?

The movie doesn’t really explain it, but you can let your imagination run wild. The BRI intervention may be an entirely imagined set-up by Carroll. Another possibility is that Carroll was wearing a bulletproof vest, but in that case how could he appear dead in the ambulance?

The ending reflects the thought of Melanie Laurent, who wanted to make Voleuses a modern and feminist film. Above all, she wanted to show the kind of female friendship we rarely see that unites the characters of Alex and Carol.

For AlloCiné, the director explains:It came from the frustration of the audience. In action movies, women don’t have much love for each other. There is something cold and cynical about their humor. It’s a battle of who will be the sexiest. We don’t know if they will drink aperitifs at the end of the day. I wanted people to feel close to us.“

He continues: “I think it’s cool to tell little girls that we can be great friends. We can’t be jealous of women, we can fight in love, we can have children on our own if we want, we can be free, have a lot of fun, decide, make our own choices.”

In her previous film Le Bal des Folles, Mélanie Laurent talked about these women who ended up in prison because they were free. “With the volleys, I said to myself: “In a hundred years, what women can be free?”

Commentaries collected by Thomas Desroches, Paris, October 25, 2023.

Thieves is available on Netflix