Black Widow is now playing in theaters and on Disney+ Premiere Access, and after months of speculation, the true identity of the villainous Taskmaster was finally revealed.
If you haven't seen Black Widow yet, major spoilers follow.
Many fans were convinced that O.T. Fagbenle's Mason would ultimately be unveiled as the highly-skilled baddie, but when the character was unmasked towards the end of the movie, we found out that Dreykov's enforcer was actually his own daughter, Antonia, who Natasha believed she had killed many years before.
This was obviously a devastating moment for Romanoff, but it also gave her an opportunity at redemption that she never would have thought possible before. While speaking to Total Film, director Cate Shortland discussed the big reveal and the importance of Taskmaster's identity in relation to Nat's journey.
"What's great in the film is, you see that [Natasha] physically has to face what she's done," she explains. "It's not a fragment [of that]. It's real. And so she's really facing her worst nightmare. I almost see Taskmaster as being her psyche, 'This is what I've done, and it's coming back to get me.' The androgyny of the character is really interesting."
"Natasha is a perpetrator," Shortland continues. "And that's what I love is this ambiguity. She's not Superman. She's done some terrible things. And this is the film where she has to face that. And, what it does is, it allows her to go to Endgame and the sacrifice she makes with resolve because she's had to face all the parts that she's tried to shut down inside her. All the little black boxes, she's had to open them up or Yelena is kicking them open."
The villain being revealed to be Dreykov's daughter has been met with something of a mixed reaction from fans, due in large part to the perception that there wasn't enough focus placed on the character after she was unmasked.
What did you guys make of the twist? Did you see it coming? Drop us a comment down below.