Posted by Muted is one of those psychological thrillers with everything a good drama needs: a peculiar plot, a protagonist full of mystery, a story that needs to be progressively explained, characters that are not always what they seem, and a shocking ending. Netflix viewers have definitely enjoyed it, and an analysis is needed to understand the story of Ana and Sergio, and how their lives intertwine. Let’s delve into it.
You can watch the official trailer for Netflix’s Muted here on Youtube.
Muted plot & ending explained: the story of Ana and Sergio
In the plot of Netflix’s Muted, we follow the story of Sergio, a young boy who spent several years in prison after he killed his own parents. Since that day, he stopped talking, except for a few exceptions. After six years in jail, he’s allowed to spend a probation period in his home. However, he’s secretly monitored in every movement by Ana, the psychiatrist who has studied him since the day of the murders.
In every episode, we watch Sergio’s life through Ana’s monitoring. She knows Sergio better than anyone, and she’s running this project to discover his true story, convinced that he’s not a psychopath. Sergio goes to work, prays, and interacts with Marta (one of the “fans” who wrote him while he was in prison). Progressively, though, we start noticing that Ana is sincerely attracted to Sergio. She describes it as a frequent behavior, explaining to Marta that they share the same feelings.
Things get more complicated when we get to the big plot twist in the middle of Muted plot, an event that needs to be explained: Ana is the woman who adopted Noa, Sergio’s sister, after he killed his parents. Noa was a little girl when Sergio murdered his parents, she was an adoptive child in that family, and after the murders, she was assigned to another family: it was Noa adopting her. This gives us more hints about Ana’s obsession with Sergio.
This obsession needs to be explained to better understand the ending of Muted: Ana was a student of Sergio’s mother, an experienced psychiatrist. After Sergio killed his mother, she went on studying Sergio’s case. His story increasingly fascinated her: she related with him; they were both children not “seen” or understood by their parents. Year after year, Ana developed a sort of obsession with Sergio. She wrote him letters under a false name while he was in prison. She seems to have sincere feelings for him. And she’s doing everything he can to prove he’s not a sociopath. That’s one of the reasons that pushed her to adopt Sergio’s sister Noa after the murders. By raising Noa, she’s sure she will always have a chance to keep the contact with Sergio. Ultimately, she always wanted to have a connection with him.
When we get closer to the ending of Muted, we hear how Sergio explained what happened that night: he confesses it to Ana while Noa and Ana’s husband listen to them through the secret cameras. Sergio tells Ana that his mother tortured him, forcing him to take experimental drugs and treating him as the subject of a clinical study. At some point, Sergio discovered that his mother wanted to start experimenting with Noa as well. According to Sergio’s explanation, that triggered a confrontation with his father, and during a fight, his father accidentally pushed his mother off the balcony. Immediately after, he jumped.
This explanation supports Ana’s theory that Sergio is actually a victim. But after hearing this, Noa runs to Ana, hugs Sergio, and reveals the truth: Sergio really killed his parents during a violent episode of anger. Sergio’s mother was trying to help him with the medicaments and never intended to give drugs to Noa. Sergio has real self-control problems and needed help; he killed his parents when he was out of control. And Noa watched it. She came back and explained all this for her mother Ana: by giving her the truth, she allowed her to freely choose what she wanted to do.
That’s how the ending of Muted develops: Ana realizes the truth, she’s broken. Still, she decides to stay next to Sergio, following her obsession with him. Noa runs away to her father, knowing she just lost her mother. Sergio and Ana are crying, silently. Then Sergio opens the window and holds out a hand to Ana, pulling her towards the balcony. Ana tries to stop Sergio but then realizes they are together in this: both their lives are over, they both lost their families, they are alone, and nobody wants them. They both no longer have reasons to live.
The ending of Muted needs to be explained separately. We see Sergio and Ana on the balcony through the broken camera. One of them falls from the balcony and dies. The TV series intentionally leaves unclear whether Sergio or Ana died. You may rewatch the ending closely, and you’ll probably notice that the falling body has naked arms, revealing that it should be Ana. If that’s true, there are two possibilities: either Sergio pushed Ana off the balcony, proving he’s a real sociopath (after all, he was the one wanting Ana with him out of the window), or Ana jumped off spontaneously after realizing her life is entirely broken.
The truth is that the TV series Muted had no intention to clarify who dies at its ending, so this point cannot be explained beyond any doubt. But after the last scene, we surely know that Sergio really killed his parents in one of his moments out of control, and Ana had an obsession with him that went beyond her job and her family. The stories of Ana and Sergio get twisted together almost involuntarily, crashing against each other in the show’s last scene.
