Caged Wings follows Dan, a budding street artist who also does robberies with his friends to get by, as he has to skip town and move to Madrid with his romantic interest as dangers loom and lurk at every corner. The film is available to stream on Netflix.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
Caged Wings begins with Dan, a budding street, running from cops after a smash-and-grab heist with his friends Vio and Reno.
He lives with his old grandmother, and his father is in jail.
After a night out with the buddies and doing some graffiti art on a train, Dan returns home to find his ambulance parked outside the building. His grandmother has passed away.
His father shows up with cuffs at the funeral. A few days later, Dan hangs out with his friends when Vio tells them about a jewelry store he has scoped in Badalona.
He wants to buy his new fling Francesca a Chanel bag.
The next day, Dan returns home to find his father, who’s been released from jail and immediately wants to make clear who’s in charge.
A primary antagonist in Caged Wings, and Dan’s life, Toño makes fun of him for his drawings, drawing parallels with his late mother, who was also an artist.
He denigrates her by calling her a junkie who thought she was something special.
He tells Dan that she would have abandoned him for a few grams of drugs, just like he abandoned his grandmother, trying to make him feel guilty for not being there with her when she died.
As soon as his father goes outside, Dan packs his things and leaves home after spraying the walls of the home with a can.
Dan goes to Vio’s apartment, which is already a mess. Her sister reprimands her for having visitors.
Dan tells Vio about his father and how he’s not going back to live with him. He plans to stay at Reno’s place for a while.
He wishes to move to a neighborhood in Berlin, Kreuzberg, where a load of street artists live. He also intends to learn all he can from them there. He tells Vio about this plan of his.
But for this, he’s going to need cash. Vio gets ready for another heist.
It goes awry and a cop apprehends Reno and Vio. It becomes worse when Dan hits the cop pinning down Vio on the head with a hammer.
He runs off with Vio but she stops midway and lashes out at Dan for ruining her life with the potential ramifications of what he’s just done. Despite that, Vio goes on the run with Dan.
They skip town and move to a neighborhood in Madrid for a while.
Dan fails to pawn off or sell the gold he looted from the heist, but Vio succeeds in doing so. She gets little money from it but it buys them a place to stay at Yesica Hostel.
The next morning, the two go shopping and at an internet cafe, they look up the news articles about their robbery last night. The police are looking for them.
They read about Reno, who’s out awaiting trial. Vio tells Dan they have to talk to Reno after a few days until the dust settles.
Dan buys some weed from a local seller who’s really sketchy. When the police come to arrest someone else at the hostel, he and Vio get scared. That’s when she asks him to
They talk to Reno, who tells them he won’t get any time if he stays out of trouble for a few months.
He apologizes for telling the cops about them, saying he had no choice when the cops wanted to pin everything on him.
He also tells them that the same can’t be said about them, since a cop was attacked.
He also reveals that Dan’s father is back in jail because when they went to his home looking for Dan, they found some illegal stuff there that put his father in jail again.
They spend some quality time for a while in Madrid.
One night, while trying to steal some liquor from a store, Dan gets distracted by the store owner who’s beating and scolding his kid to discipline him.
It awakens traumatic memories and Dan starts pummeling him until he’s stopped by Vio who takes him away and lashes at out him for nearly killing the guy.
Vio tells him she can’t live every day fearing they’ll get busted. She says she misses Málaga, where a cousin of hers, who works at a hotel, can find her a job.
She asks Dan what he wants to do and he says he only knows that he doesn’t want to go back. She tells him he’s so talented and not to give up.
He wakes up in the middle of the night to return to the graffiti of a snake he had drawn on a wall a couple of days back and sets it ablaze.
It’s a release for him, as he breaks down and starts bawling.
The next morning, he takes Vio to the place where he shows her the graffiti of her face he’s painted on a wall.
Vio kisses him, before the two have sex back in the hostel room, as Caged Wings reaches its third act.
He asks her to come with him to Berlin. He wants her to be with him. She asks what she would do there and he says she can start over like she’s always wanted, and so can he.
Before she can answer, the receptionist bangs on their door to tell them their friend is calling.
Reno tells him over the phone that his father sent people to his home, where they beat him up to find out about Dan’s location.
He says his father blames him for sending him to jail again. Dan hastily gets Vio to pack up stuff and run away.
She stops him on the way and asks him to compose himself, when the local dealer and his men ambush them, starting to harass Vio.
They go to rape her, when Dan tries to stop them through violence.
The dealer stabs him with a knife before walking away because of cops. Dan seemingly dies in Vio’s arms.
Sometime later, Vio works as a waitress at a restaurant in Berlin, and Dan is not far from her thoughts, as Caged Wings rolls the credits.
Ending explained:
What happens to Toño?
Toño is one of the antagonists in Caged Wings, and Dan’s father.
He gets released from jail shortly after Dan’s grandmother passes away. He has been abusive to Dan, which is evident immediately after his return.
Dan can’t live under the same roof as him anymore, so he packs his stuff and leaves home.
After his heist goes wrong, Dan and his friend/romantic interest, Vio, move to a neighborhood in Madrid to hide from the authorities.
Since Dan also bashed a cop in the head with a hammer, the cops come looking for him at his home, but he’s not there.
What they do find there is some illegal stuff that belongs to Toño, which is enough for the police to put him back in jail.
Days go by and Toño, who blames Dan for getting him jailed again, sends his guys to rough up Dan’s friend Reno, to get him to break and give away Dan’s current location.
That’s the last the viewers see or hear of Toño, apart from a couple of hallucinations that Dan has of him before Caged Wings rolls the credits.
Is Dan dead?
As soon as Dan hears from Reno that his father has learned about his current location and has sent his men to get him, he leaves the Yesica Hostel room with Vio.
Not too long after leaving, they’re ambushed by a gang of drug dealers and ruffians.
They harass Vio and attempt to gangrape her, but Dan throws hands to stop them.
In retaliation, he earns a knife in his stomach, courtesy of the drug dealer he bought weed from a couple of days ago. They all disperse after they spot cops nearby, leaving Dan, who bleeds out in Vio’s arms.
She asks him to stay awake and not leave her, but he loses consciousness and seems as good as dead.
However, before the credits roll, the epilogue shows Vio working as a waitress at a restaurant in Berlin.
She stops in front of a projector that screens photos of the sketches from Dan’s drawing book, as Dan’s voice, out of frame, greets her with “Hey.”
She looks back with a smile, before walking toward that voice
Although the scene in Madrid seems pretty clear about Dan’s demise, his fate is ambiguous.
Caged Wings leaves viewers with conflicting visuals in Vio’s sad face at the end, while Dan’s not visible at all.
His voice at the end can just be a hallucination, like the many times it happens with Dan himself throughout the film.
However, it’s upon the individual interpretations of the ending to decide whether Dan and Vio get their happy ending or not.
