American Psycho ending explained

What happens

Bateman confesses his murders to his lawyer by phone, then finds the apartment cleaned and for sale. The lawyer laughs it off, mistaking him for someone else. Nothing is punished, nothing is released, and he stays exactly as empty as before.

The last image

Bateman sits among his colleagues, his confession ignored and his emptiness unchanged.

Two readings

1 · It all happenedThe murders are real, and a world of surfaces simply cannot see them.

2 · It was fantasyThe violence is imagined, and the confession fails because there was never anything to confess.

What it says

The film's target is not one man but a world too self-absorbed to notice anyone. Bateman's confession changes nothing because nobody is really looking. The ending denies you catharsis, so the emptiness is the horror, whichever reading you choose.