The Last Sunrise Ending Explained: Does Ry Remember Julián?

Does Ry remember Julián at the end of The Last Sunrise?

The film refuses to tell you, and the refusal is deliberate.

This article gives away the whole film, including the last scene. If you haven't watched it, our review of The Last Sunrise covers the setup without the ending.

Oriah "Ry" Pera (Maia Reficco) survives the operation she spent the film refusing, and wakes without recognising Julián García (Fernando Lindez). That is the exact thing she was afraid of, and the film lets it land. Her memories come back one by one. The last scene is the beach, where Julián walks up, introduces himself again, and she smiles.

It doesn't play as full recognition and it doesn't play as meeting a stranger either. The film never tells you how much of him she has back, and it stops there. Director Carlson Young has since confirmed that viewers aren't meant to know, which means the ambiguity is the answer rather than a gap in the writing.

What happens to Ry at the end of The Last Sunrise?

Isolde Pera (Eva Longoria) discovers that Ry has stopped taking the medication controlling her seizures, and moves to take her home to Texas. Ry refuses, runs out of the hotel, and collapses into the pool. Her mother pulls her out.

At the hospital she is told the tuberous sclerosis has become unmanageable and that surgery is now the only option left. She refuses it again. She goes to the beach to tell Julián the truth about her condition, which she had been hiding from him the whole time. They fall asleep on the sand. He wakes up. She doesn't.

Why Ry refuses the surgery in The Last Sunrise

The operation removes the tubers growing in her brain, and it carries a risk to her memory. Ry's objection isn't fear of dying. It's that a version of her who remembers none of this isn't her.

That's the argument the whole film is built on, and it's why the ending has to give her the memories back rather than simply give her a heartbeat. Survival on its own would have answered the wrong question.

Who authorises Ry's surgery in The Last Sunrise?

Not Ry. The doctors tell Isolde the operation is the only thing that will save her daughter, and Julián is the one who argues her into signing, against Ry's clearly stated wishes and against a promise Isolde had made not to force it.

This is the most interesting thing in the film and it goes by fast. Two people who love her override a decision she made repeatedly, while she is unconscious and cannot object, and the film's answer is that they were right, because it worked. It never asks what the same scene looks like if the surgery had taken her memory for good. Nobody is punished, nobody is wrong, and the question closes as soon as she wakes up.

What the letters between Isolde and Mateo reveal

Isolde has already told Ry the important part herself. Mateo García (Andrés Velencoso) was her first love. After her own mother died, everything about Mallorca reminded her of that loss and she had to leave. Mateo wouldn't leave his family and the fishing business behind. They wrote to each other for years, and then the letters stopped.

What Julián brings to the hospital is a bundle of that old correspondence. He found his father's letters when he was eight years old, and has only just worked out that the Izzy in them was Ry's mother.

So the letters don't explain why Isolde left. That was already on the table. What they do is close the loop for Julián, and put both families' histories in the same room at the worst possible moment.

How Isolde and Julián's family end up on the same side

Isolde is in Mallorca to close a hotel deal for a company called Redwyn, and the land she needs is the land Julián's family fishes from. For most of the film that makes her the obstacle without ever making her the villain.

The resolution is that Isolde fixes it herself. She invests in the family business and buys different land for the hotel, and everyone comes out ahead. It is the softest available landing for a story about a developer flattening a fishing village, and it takes about a scene. Ry is still in Spain when the film ends.

Why The Last Sunrise opens and closes on the same beach

The final scene is Julián introducing himself to Ry on a beach, which is exactly how they met. The shot is also among the film's opening images, so the symmetry is deliberate rather than a coincidence of location.

It supports two readings and settles neither. Either she recognises him, at least partly, and the restaged introduction is helping a memory surface. Or she doesn't, and Julián is starting the whole thing again from nothing, which is its own kind of romantic. The film keeps both alive on purpose, so anyone who tells you which one is correct is telling you their preference.

What it doesn't do is complete the mirror. The first version of that scene runs on him being naked and her being clothed. The second leaves them both dressed. The film builds its own rhyme and then declines the last line of it.

How The Last Sunrise ends differently from Anna Todd's novel

The novel is far more definite. Ry remembers Julián quickly, and an epilogue set a year later leaves the two of them together.

The natural assumption is that the film cut that epilogue. The chronology runs the other way. Anna Todd sold the story as a feature first, and the screenplay and the novel were then developed alongside each other. The film was already moving before the book existed as a published thing, so the two endings diverge because they became separate versions of the same story, not because one lopped the ending off the other.

Is there a sequel to The Last Sunrise?

Not yet, and nothing has been greenlit.

Deadline reported in June that Prime Video was considering one. Screenwriter Anna Klassen said publicly that she had already started writing it, and Todd has since described a second draft existing. A draft is not a commission.

Young has said there are plenty of places to go from an ending she left open on purpose, and that what interests her is the remembering itself. Which tells you the intent without telling you the decision.