Plot Summary: A farmer conspires to kill his wife after she wants to sell the farm off and move to the city. But his actions have deadly consequences.
There's always that one year that holds meaning for us and it's not because something eventful happened every single day, but because something eventful happened one day of which the repercussions traversed through a couple of days or weeks.
It then becomes known as the year of something bad happening.
Good moments are rarely attributed a whole year and perhaps it is because those are little moments that last hardly for a day.
Having a bad year becomes memorable. It is that one bad occurrence that shapes our future and our lives.
The good days and moments are like consolation prizes for getting through the bad days which is why we think more about the bad days that keep going on and on.
1922 is a movie about such a year. Only the character in the movie brought upon his own bad days by the one single bad thing he did.
1922 Movie Plot
When the movie opens it isn't 1922, but 1930, and a man named Wilfred James is in a hotel room, penning a letter.
He takes us back to a fateful year, 1922 when he used to be a farmer. While he enjoyed his quiet, simple farm life with his son Henry, his wife Arlette is keen on joining the city life. Her plan is to sell the farmland that belongs to her and open a dress shop.
Wilfred and Arlette already have a rocky marriage and when he learns of his wife's plan, he gets upset. He's happy where he is and enjoys the simple, playful days he has with his son who is just as keen to remain on the farm.
Of course, it isn't only because Henry loves farming, he's sweet on his neighbour Shannon whose father Harlan is one of the keen buyers of Wilfred and Arlette's farmland.
When Arlette remains adamant about moving to the city, Wilfred offers to buy her part of the land and they can go their separate ways. Arlette reminds him he hasn't got that kind of money and that she would be taking Henry with her because a child needs a mother more.
Wilfred's cozy little life is being threatened so he does the unthinkable: plot his wife's murder. And worst of all, he gets Henry to help him go along with it.
In the next few days, Wilfred turns Henry against his mother by telling him how she would take him away from his girlfriend and how he would never get to wear overalls and do farming.
Henry is easily convinced but more so because he's a teenager who is only thinking about his girlfriend more.
With a plan in place, Wilfred approaches Arlette and tells her that he too wants to give the city life a try. Arlette is pleased and they all celebrate by drinking. There is no other way, is there?
But Arlette is a mean drunk and immediately insults Henry and Shannon's relationship. Henry gets upset and even though he was hoping there was another way to get Arlette out of the way than murdering her, he's so riled up, he agrees to help carry his mother upstairs and place a sheet over her while his father messily slits Arlette's throat.
The duo then carry Arlette outside towards the well, but Henry doesn't have the strength anymore and collapses. Wilfred is hell-bent on seeing his plan through and dumps his dead wife into the well. Henry wakes up just after that.
The next step is to toss Arlette's suitcase in the well too. Wilfred has already readied a story wherein he would tell everyone his wife simply packed a light suitcase and absconded.
As he opens the well again to toss the suitcase in, he notices rats crawling all over Arlette's corpse, including in her mouth. Wilfred is repulsed and quickly drops the suitcase on the rats and closes up the well.
But he knows Arlette was in talks with potential buyers of the farmland and is certain someone or the other will come to check up on her so he needs to fill in the well fast. But if he simply filled up the well, it would raise suspicion.
So the next step in the plan is to toss in an old cow in their farm. The poor cow was probably not giving milk anymore and so father and son thought it was a better fate for the cow to go down the well.
As luck would have it, the cow was sturdy enough to survive the fall but not enough to sustain a bullet. Wilfred shoots the cow before its cries alerted the neighbors.
Just as suspected by the killer duo, the sheriff does come looking for Arlette and Wilfred shows him around the house and then offers to show the well too which he is filling up. The sheriff doesn't care enough to look at an old dried-up well so declines the offer and heads off on his way.
Wilfred and Henry realize they killed the cow for nothing but what's done is done. They fill up the well.
A few days later, Shannon comes to complain to Wilfred about Henry being too broody. Henry clearly feels guilty for his part in his mother's death. He keeps telling Wilfred there was another way to deal with things but his father doesn't say anything maybe because he too must know that there is always another way than murdering someone.
After a while, Henry leaves home after Shannon is sent away by her family to a hostel for pregnant girls. Henry breaks her out of there and the two run away.
Wilfred begins to find rats everywhere and believes Arlette is sending them over to torment him. It seems that day by day the guilt of killing his wife is consuming him as well as the depression that came with Henry leaving the house that made him realize that all that planning and plotting was for nothing.
The rats enter his house and one fine day, they bite his hand. The bite gets infected and Wilfred has to get his hand amputated. The farm starts to go into ruin and Arlette comes over to him one day to whisper what happened to Henry.
1922 Ending Explained with movie Spoilers!
After Henry and Shannon ran away, they obviously didn't have enough money so they turned to crime and became known as the sweetheart bandits. They robbed banks and stores and then a few months later while escaping from a robbery gone haywire, Shannon is shot.
Henry takes her to an abandoned house but Shannon and his unborn baby die. Unable to bear the grief, Henry shoots himself.
Sometime later, the police come over to tell Wilfred of his son and how he was almost eaten away by rats.
While a lot of people attend Shannon's funeral, the only people in attendance at Henry's is him, Arlette and dozens of rats.
Soon enough Wilfred tries to sell his farmland but no one wants it anymore and he has to sell it for less than half its price.
He moves to the city where he takes a job moving pallet. But he is still haunted by the hellish rats.
Finally, eight years later, in a hotel room, Wilfred wonders if there was another way around Arlette's murder.
He hears a noise and finds Arlette, Henry and Shannon waiting for him to join them.
The movie has some gruesome and disturbing parts and while it doesn't have any scary horror elements, just to see Wilfred turning from a cold-blooded, conniving murderer to a helpless man being haunted more by his guilt than a ghost, is frightening enough.
Scare scale: 3.5/5
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