The Ending Of Like Dogs Explained
"Like Dogs" is what happens when you start with a premise right out of a golden age slasher film but decide to take the story in the direction of the best psychological thrillers. The movie opens with people being kidnapped and put inside a bizarre science experiment where they're treated like animals, but as layers of betrayal start to get peeled back it becomes clear the experiment isn't what it seems.
Unlike the "Saw" films, "Like Dogs" is more interested in keeping you guessing than showing you grotesque images on screen. The best thing about the movie is that the audience can never guess what's about to happen next, and the plot gets propelled forward by plot twist after plot twist.
Of course, all of that means there's plenty to keep track of as the movie builds to a climax. By the second or third double cross, it can be easy to mix up what everyone's real motivations are and who, if anyone, is innocent in this entire experiment. Luckily for you, we've got a full breakdown on how "Like Dogs" reaches its dramatic conclusion.
What you need to remember about the plot of Like Dogs
"Like Dogs" begins with a kidnapping — or so you think on your first viewing. Lisa (Annabel Barrett) is snatched off the street and taken to a massive dog kennel with multiple empty stalls. She's chained to the wall and left alone, but every so often one of her captors, wearing what amounts to a full hazmat suit, comes to feed her a bowl of dog food or spray her down with a hose. Lisa's miserable situation gets a tiny bit better when her captors introduce her to Adam (Ignacyo Matynia), another victim who's been locked in a different part of the kennel for weeks.
Not long after Lisa and Adam meet, their tormentors start slipping some kind of hallucinogenic drug into their food. At that point the movie pulls out its first big twist. When Adam passes out, the experimenters pull Lisa from her kennel, and the audience realizes that she's only been posing as a victim.
Lisa, George (Ryan Q. Tran), and Erika (Shay Denison) are all university students researching what happens when human beings are treated like dogs. While their supervisor Dr. Fischer (Katy Dore) was away, Lisa hijacked the experiment, forcing the other two to kidnap Adam so she could manipulate him into falling in love with her. George, who's secretly in love with Lisa, and Erika, who's Lisa's best friend, reluctantly agree to help, but it's not at all clear what Lisa's endgame really is.
What happened at the end of Like Dogs
To a certain extent, Lisa's plan to manipulate Adam works. Believing that the two of them are captives in some sort of sick game, Adam really does start developing feelings for Lisa. She thinks that once he's fully in love with her, George and Erika can drug the two of them and dump them miles away in the woods, but before Lisa's plan can fully play out, Dr. Fischer returns.
Dr. Fischer pulls Lisa out of the experiment to interrogate her. The doctor reveals that she did some research into Lisa's past and discovered that she's been living a lie. Lisa has had multiple pseudonyms over the years because she's made a habit out of creating twisted games to manipulate people. Whenever she gets close to getting caught, she burns all her bridges and changes her identity. To stop her secret from getting out, Lisa murders Dr. Fischer and heads back into the kennel to finish her manipulation of Adam.
Unfortunately for Lisa, she's not the only one with big plans. All this time George has been in love with Lisa, and when he discovers Dr. Fischer's body, he decides that it's time to reveal the truth. George shows Lisa that he's kidnapped all of her ex-boyfriends and trapped them in the dog experiment. Then he confesses his love to her, and when Lisa doesn't reciprocate his feelings, George kills Adam. Lisa and Erika work together to kill George, but then Lisa beats Erika over the head, burns down the lab, and leaves to start her life over once again.
What was the real purpose of the experiment?
At the center of all the secret identities, deep betrayals, and dramatic reveals in "Like Dogs" is the social experiment itself. In the beginning of the film, it seems like the experiment is just a thinly veiled excuse to torture people. Lisa and Adam both seem to be victims of some sadistic torturer à la Jigsaw, but with a real thing for man's best friend.
It's all been just a trick that Lisa came up with so she could manipulate Adam into having feelings for her. She thought that if the two of them were trapped in a desperate situation where they needed each other to survive and escape, Adam couldn't help but fall for her. The real experiment was funded by Lisa's university, and all the actual participants being treated like dogs in other kennels were volunteers who wanted to help out with some research.
Except that's not exactly true, either. At the end of the movie we learn that the other captives being treated like dogs aren't volunteers at all. Instead they're Lisa's exes, who George tracked down and captured as part of his own deranged efforts to woo her. Dr. Fischer probably set up a legitimate experiment for her students, but as soon as she let them run the research themselves without any real oversight, George and Lisa both took matters into their own hands.
Did the hallucinations have a deeper meaning?
Early on in the movie, Lisa and Adam realize that they're being drugged through their food. Whatever chemical cocktail is forced into them causes them to experience intense hallucinations before passing out and having vivid dreams. These visions lead to some of the biggest jump scares in the movie, like when Adam sees a horrifying alien creature inside the hazmat suit of one of his captors.
The hallucinations are also Lisa's first clue that someone else may be using the dog experiment for their own purposes. When she leaves the kennel to coordinate her plans with Erika and George she asks them about drugs in her food, and Erika comes to believe that all the stress of living as a supposed prisoner is causing Lisa to hallucinate on her own. Lisa shakes off her concerns so she can focus her energy on Adam, but she keeps hallucinating and having dreams of one of her ex-boyfriends whenever she eats the dog food.
Later, George reveals that he was drugging their food for the most sadistic reason imaginable. When Lisa refuses to be with him even after he shows her that he's been tormenting her ex-boyfriends, he tells her that every time she was drugged, he sexually assaulted her in one of the exam rooms. It was all a part of George's sick plot to be the real master manipulator of the experiment, but it's also likely the reason that George gets murdered by Lisa in the end.
Who was betraying who?
There are only a handful of characters in "Like Dogs" who are genuine, honest people, and even though they live life with uncompromised morals, they don't get to live terribly long. Dr. Fischer thought that Lisa and George were regular college students, and she never anticipated that they were murderous sadists who would take over her research lab for their own purposes. Her reward for being so trusting is a relatively quick death at Lisa's hands.
Poor Adam thought that Lisa was the only person he could trust after being kidnapped and forced to live like a dog. He never realized that Lisa was the one who put him there in the first place, and he barely survives long enough to learn that he's just been a pawn in George's manipulation of Lisa.
Erika might have the worst fate in the film. She loves Lisa so much that she's willing to help her questionable plot to win Adam's affections. She thinks George is just another friendly research tech. Erika remains a good friend from beginning to end, and it costs her everything. George and Lisa betray everyone else in the movie, and there's no doubt Lisa will be tearing apart another group of people under a new assumed identity sometime in the near future.
What does Lisa's past have to do with everything?
George might be the most sadistic character in the movie, but his motives aren't nearly as mysterious as Lisa's. George wants Lisa for himself, and he's willing to do anything to make that happen. Whether it's torturing people who Lisa might see as enemies or torturing Lisa herself, George will go to incredible lengths to get what he wants.
Lisa, on the other hand, has more than one motivation that keeps her running throughout the movie. She's obsessed with Adam and wants to make him fall in love with her, but whatever relationship she has with Adam is just one episode in a lengthy history of psychotic behavior and twisted manipulation.
We learn along with Dr. Fischer that Lisa has lived under several different names throughout her life. She inhabits a new persona, finds some way to torment the new people in her life, then moves on to the next city and identity. We learn very few concrete details about Lisa's past because she's willing to murder Dr. Fischer to prevent the truth from getting out. Whatever happened to Lisa before she became Lisa left her completely cold-hearted, willing to imprison her love interest for weeks on end and kill her best friend when she thinks it's convenient. It's impossible to say what Lisa's life has been like before the events of "Like Dogs," but she's already established her sadistic routines, and we get to watch her usual show and dance play out over the course of the movie.
What were Lisa's real intentions?
By the end of "Like Dogs" there are some things that don't quite add up. Lisa had George and Erika kidnap Adam so she could pretend that the two of them were prisoners together. She wanted to make Adam fall in love with her, but after that, what was her real plan? Did she actually think that she and Adam could be dumped in the woods and then just move on with their lives together?
If we know anything about Lisa it's that she's a cold, calculated thinker. She had to know that the chances of getting to be with Adam outside of the experiment were slim at best. Even if Dr. Fischer didn't discover what was really going on at the lab, it was only a matter of time before Lisa's manipulation of Adam totally collapsed.
It seems likely that Lisa's plans with Adam were actually for the short term at most. We know that she's lived multiple lives, and that she does awful things to the people she meets whenever she sets up shop in a new city. Getting Adam to fall in love with her was probably just her goal for this "Lisa" identity. Once she did that, she'd just burn all her bridges and move on. Maybe her burning wouldn't have been as literal as it is in the movie, but all things considered, it seems like Lisa's real plan went off without a hitch.
What has Randy Van Dyke said about Like Dogs?
Randy Van Dyke is the writer-director behind "Like Dogs." Taking a shot at making a horror flick is a bit of a departure for the filmmaker. He's previously worked on quirky features like "Non-Stop to Comic-Con" and "Pink Lemonade." This time around, though, Van Dyke had some terrifying inspiration to work with.
"I was definitely inspired by the Stanford prison experiment," Van Dyke told LRM online. He was initially intrigued by the thought of people running experiments on each other, but the animal focus didn't come until later. While scouting locations for a different project, Van Dyke stumbled upon the cement dog kennel that plays a central role in "Like Dogs" and knew immediately what direction he wanted to go for his next film.
The inspiration of "Like Dogs" was instantaneous, but the final vision for the project was not. Early on, the movie had a much different tone. "It was trying to be more of a gory, slasher kind of horror movie," Van Dyke said, "and we really wanted to kind of hone it down into the psychological thriller that it kind of is now." Horror fans might have expected a gore-fest from a movie that at first glance looks like a torture film, but "Like Dogs" definitely works better because it subverts expectations and introduces so many twists and turns in the narrative.
Could there be a sequel?
There doesn't seem to be a sequel to "Like Dogs" on the horizon, but never say never. One of the movie's strengths is that it leaves so much to the audience's imagination. Is this the first time that George has developed an elaborate sadistic plot? What was Lisa been doing before she set up this new life for herself at the university? Where will she go now that she's literally burned her identity to the ground?
Any of those questions could be fodder for another story. A sequel could easily dive into Lisa's past and show how she became the master manipulator that she is in "Like Dogs," or it could look forward and show us what happens when she finds her next set of victims. Then again, we might not want to entirely rule out the other characters in "Like Dogs."
Anyone who sticks around through the credits will catch the biggest hint that the movie leaves for a sequel. As it turns out, Erika actually manages to escape the fire that Lisa starts in the lab. Because she's still alive, she could spend her time tracking Lisa down, either trying to prevent her next attack on innocent victims or just trying to get revenge. Seeing a truly even fight between the two would make for a great conclusion to their stories.