Netflix’s latest Thai thriller mystery, Delete follows two lovers stumbling upon a device that can delete people from existence, and deciding to use it for grim purposes.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
Aim and Lilly are having an extramarital affair and both love each other. Lilly’s husband Too, a rich man who has a proclivity for brutality, eventually finds out about the affair.
Aim’s girlfriend Orn also finds out, but she does it by recording the two having sex via a spy camera. She threatens to go public with the tape if he doesn’t remain with her.
Meanwhile, Lilly stumbles upon a young girl who asks if she can take a photo of her. She hands Lilly a strange phone and when Lilly hits the click, there’s a bright momentary camera flash during which the girl disappears.
Lilly shows Aim the phone and an initially disbelieving Aim eventually confirms the power of the phone camera himself. He later decides to use it to delete Orn when she seems to not budge from her decision to go public with the sex tape.
Along with Orn’s disappearance, Lilly goes missing too. Captain Yutthachai gets assigned the case and he gets on digging. When the caretaker at the Nursing Home where Orn’s mother stays suspects Aim, he’s interrogated by Yutthachai, and when his photo with Lilly is leaked online, the suspicions grow even stronger.
Too’s sister June is revealed to be the possessor of the phone which she uses on her bully at school. Meanwhile, a masked man assaults Too asking for the phone, and later assaults June and her friend Tong for it, deleting her in the process.
Too and Aim both figure out the identity of the masked man around the same time and together, manage to bring him down. Lilly’s whereabouts and the backstory of the girl at the supermarket both are revealed.
Lilly reveals her shocking decision to Aim, who’s devastated, and when the guilt becomes too much for him to bear, he makes a drastic decision. Lilly goes to meet Too but ends up stumbling upon a harrowing secret, something that June discovers on her own at the same time as well.
Delete ending explained in detail:
How does the phone work?
At the center of Delete is a supernatural phone-like device with a large camera at the back. The device only seems to have two features — clicking pictures and viewing the gallery of said pictures.
However, it’s no simple capturing-the-moment spiel with this device. Once you point it at the subject(s), and hit click, the ensuing flash will make said subject(s) disappear.
There’s no trace of them left and they simply perish into thin air, albeit their bedazzled faces washed with the flash’s light, all saved in the phone. A person can’t delete themselves, though, which is made evident when an unsuspecting June tries to take a selfie and can neither capture it nor vanish out of existence.
Another crucial feature of this supernatural device is that it will spit the deleted people back into existence when the person that photographed/deleted them, gets deleted themselves.
What happens to Lilly?
Lilly’s husband Too learns about her affair through his sister June, when she shows him a photo of Lilly kissing Aim. He eventually also learns that she’s pregnant and that the baby is Aim’s. However, when she confesses this all to him, he still asks her to stay and give their marriage another chance.
That night, Lilly sneaks out to go to Aim but on her way, she gets kidnapped by Captain Yutthachai. He brings her home and cuffs her to a bed. He and his wife interrogate her regarding the whereabouts of the camera, but she does know where it is.
She genuinely doesn’t know, as she never saw June nick it from her bag earlier on. Yutthachai later pursues June for the phone and manages to retrieve it as well, deleting her in the process. Before he can come back home and delete Lilly to revive his daughter, Claire, Lilly manages to uncuff herself, restrain Yutthachai’s wife, and make a run for it.
She enters a supermarket and calls up Too to come to save her, while the supermarket employee calls the police. Yutthachai arrives as the policeman responding to the call and gets to Lilly, ultimately deleting her which brings his daughter back into existence. However, Too witnesses him deleting Lilly.
Too gives chase and reaches Yutthachai’s home, pointing a gun at his wife and daughter to blackmail the phone out of him. He then shoots Yutthachai in the shoulder but he bolts, leading to Too chasing him again and eventually pinning him down.
Yutthachai lets out the function of the device and while Too goes to pick up the device, the Captain sneaks up on him and goes to attack him, only for Aim to arrive and stop him from doing that. Too finally deletes him and brings Lilly back.
She thinks back on how Too still wanted to get together with her, knowing that she cheated and is pregnant with Aim’s baby. As Aim is onto it himself, Lilly apologizes to him and confesses she wants to be with Too and give him another chance.
At the end of Delete, when she goes to confront Too about deleting Aim, she stumbles upon a secret basement inside the stable, and when she walks down the stairs, she discovers decomposed bodies of girls in containers.
She hides in one of the empty ones when she hears Too walk in. She sees as he gets rid of all the corpses with the help of the phone, but she also ends up making a noise that catches Too’s attention. As he walks towards her container, Delete rolls the credits and leaves Lilly’s fate to a second season.
What happens to Aim?
Seeing Lilly choose Too over him after all that transpired, Aim really spirals. He’s wracked by the guilt of deleting Orn, and it only gets more extreme when he sees that the book she had tried to gift him a while back had a little note with a ring attached to it, as her proposal, but he had not even opened that book back then.
It all gets too much for him to bear and he decides to right his wrongs, calling Too to do him a favor. He posts a confession on Facebook, talking about how the story for the book he got famous for was fake, and that it was a whole different picture.
He writes his last words and when Too arrives, it’s revealed that he wants to be deleted so Orn can come back. While Lilly reads his post online and gets worried, driving over to his house immediately, Too deletes him.
Lilly goes to his room, only to find Orn there, and figures out that Too has deleted Aim. Later, Orn plays the recording of the days she was absent, thanks to the camera she had set up, and horrifyingly looks at Aim having photographed herself out of existence.
Before Lilly can confront Too about it, she discovers a whole new harrowing secret that puts her life at risk.
Who happened to Thong?
While going through the posts on her Instagram burner account, June looks at Lilly in all of them wistfully and eventually starts deleting them, hoping to move on. That’s until she finds one post that has Lilly and Too sitting beside a familiar face, and June eventually remembers who it is.
The young woman sitting beside them in the photo is none other than Tong’s older sister, Thong, who went mission years ago and hasn’t been found yet. Her mother still prays for her to be discovered but her brother Tong has given up all hope. Meanwhile, Lilly hides in the same basement where several containers have decomposed bodies of girls.
One of these corpses belongs to Thong. Before coming and deleting these corpses out of existence to get rid of the evidence, Too meets his father and tells him to not worry about all those women; when he asks what he’s going to do, Too seems confident, and soon the viewers find out why that is.
He’s gotten rid of all the evidence that could have incriminated him or his father for crimes either of those men or maybe both, have committed in the past.
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