[Yodamaster]

Originally Posted by CL typeS

thanks for teh recommendation! Just caught it last night, holy fkkkk this movie is way more mindfucking than inception. I still cant make sense of it after reading your explanation.

Spoiler!

It's pretty simple really, the girl was the same person as the guy all along, he was hunting himself the entire time. For simplicity, I'll refer to the character versions as either "the guy" or Ethan Hawke.

Remember when the guy is asked if he could kill the man responsible for stealing his child? The man that stole his child was the Ethan Hawke version of himself from the future, and the task that the guy was given (from Ethan Hawke) was to kill himself (herself at the time) to eliminate the paradox.

Remember the scene where the guy was trying to stop the bomber, but had his face burned off instead? That was when the guy switched to being Ethan Hawke's version, he had facial reconstructive surgery. The man that pushed the violin case over to him as he burned was Ethan Hawke, the man that the guy would eventually become.

At the end, the newest (gray haired) version of Ethan Hawke is revealed to be the bomber, and in the heat of the moment, the younger Ethan has to choose whether or not to kill him or let him live. The gray haired Ethan begs for the younger Ethan to let him live, as he realises his own mistake from years ago. The young Ethan kills the newest Ethan and the cycle continues, as he has failed to stop the paradox for the second and last time.

Until the main character breaks the cycle and lets the gray haired bomber live, it will continue forever. It's assumed that it never happens, and that timeline occurs for the rest of eternity.