I feel like the ending ruined the whole movie.

The way I see it is Manny wasn't a zombie at all but am entity that appeared to save Hank.

Think of it this way. There have been quite a few movies where a miracle happens for a despairing individual, or to save a family, or even a town in the form of some miraculous being shows up to show everyone the way. Like the movie 'Michael' with John Travolta or even 'It's a Wonderful Life', people are in trouble and an angel shows up to guide them through their troubles.

Well in this movie...that miracle happens to be a farting corpse with supernatural abilities. Hank's problem is that he's never been able to talk to or connect with anyone, he's never felt like he belonged, or that he was normal, or what it meant to be understood or loved. So he shrunk into himself, he sank deep into depression and was consumed by loneliness to the point he was stalking some random woman he saw on the bus and is now hiding out in the woods behind her house having gone completely psychotic. Right when he's about to end it all just what he needs shows up. It's a person, but a dead one, but for Hank that means being able to interact with someone who'll never judge or hurt him. It's something that he can express himself through, that he can regain his sanity and escape from his self-made prison and helped him survive the ordeal. And once he made it back to civilization and regains his sanity he no longer needs Manny, so Manny farts himself off into the sunset to help the next poor soul.

It's a crude and darkly humorous spin on a classic movie trope is what it is. After thinking about it for awhile this was the conclusion I came to.

I feel like the ending is still from Hank's point of view, so it's skewed. Everyone sees Manny, but they also see a crazy person doing odd things with a corpse. The whole film is built on Hank seeing things, that we assume that others don't. I don't think this changes at the end. Her "WTF" moment is just her exclamation seeing Hank be weird with a corpse. Hank is still the only person that sees Manny shoot off into the water.

You should have asked for explanations of the ending, rather than making poor assumptions and saying it was a bad ending. I'm 99.9% certain that Manny was not real, and I'm sure the directors or actors will (if they haven't already) confirm this in interviews eventually. I believe the point of the ending was to show Hank letting go and sort of freeing himself by farting in front of all the people who caused him to bottle everything up, as he has explained throughout the movie. That's why he was proud to announce it was him who farted. Now that he has accepted himself, he no longer needs Manny which is why he comes to life one last time (in his mind) and disappears into the ocean.

Does it matter if they actually saw Manny jet skiing into the ocean?
Two words: "Birdman" ending.

I wrote it off as the whole movie happening in his mind when he hung himself at the beginning when he first fell off the cooler(sort of like "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734554/). everything else seemed acceptable enough to me that way.

I fully agree with you that the ending sends this already bizarre movie on a complete tail spin. As you said, the movie was very creative and weird up until that point with subtle yet significant explorations of father-son relationships, love, friendship, insecurity and life in general.

I buy the idea that Hank was a runaway who had spent an uncertain amount of time in the forested region behind Sarah's house, stalking her and dreaming up various fantasies of the both of them together, all while him ofcourse, being increasingly depressed and schizophrenic. And just as he is about to commit suicide, Hank spots a dead body at the shore and his lost mind latches on to its idea of sanity; bringing the body to life. And the rest of the movie is an exploration of Hank making his way from the shore to Sarah's house. And it is on this journey that, through his interaction with Manny, we slowly learn of his reality and his assessment of life and what it means to him. Amidst all the farting and erections, some poignant observations were made, all the more accentuated by the consistently held uncertainty of how much of what we're seeing is real and how much is the imagining of our protagonist.

I believe that in the last 5-10 minutes, several revelations are made about how things had actually transpired, finally bringing everything around and settling the uncertainty. And yet again, just when we as viewers have come to terms with the events that transpired and have made sense of it all, it was quite daring of the filmmakers to once again set everything haywire via a beautifully scored, wordless few minutes of gaping civilians and Hank, with Hank's father even laughing, and Manny farting away into the setting sun.

The ending made me smile because in fact it was quite beautifully done, what with it hinting that Manny was in fact a super powered corpse, who had over the course of the movie been significantly humanized, albeit arguably through Hank's thoughts and personality alone, it was exhilarating to see him fart away to freedom; freedom from the condescending, judgmental robot folk that were to take Hank away. But then again, it jeapordizes the rest of the movie.

These sort of movies which do not conform to any genre by sheer choice are something we need more of in hollywood. We have far too much of a pre-conceived notion of what a movie that we choose to watch is supposed to be like and as a result, once in a while when a movie with such annoying ambiguity pops up we find it unsettling.

I choose to see the end as the artistic license of the makers to forego what so ever pretentiousness it had thus far embraced and turn everything around to leave us asking and contemplating what it is we'd just seen(atleast for those who made it to end, because let's face it, there can't be many who'd have sat through all of it xD)
Anyway, that's just my two cents. I think the movie was well made and unique with an incredibly original idea. Overall it definitely didn't seem to have a point, but I got the feeling that WAS it's point, to make us ask ourselves whether it had any. :)

I'm sorry this is getting too long but I also had to say, the movie was a potent mix of fantasy and psychology. There are several reasons to believe it was all Hank's mental instability alone, that he dreamt up a conversation with a dead man and made himself face society, but then again this line of thinking encounters problems when we consider the specifics. For example, while the distance from the shore to the house is shown at the end as one that could be traversed in just a couple of minutes, it puts to question the scene of Hank and Manny making their way on the narrow pipeline over the river. Once again that could have been an exaggerated imagining of the natural surroundings by Hank but to claim that the situations that Hank found himself in AS WELL AS HOW he managed to overcome them are BOTH hallucinations, greatly weakens its plausibility. For some semblance of sense, we must align that the settings that Hank found himself in were real, it was just his perception of the surroundings and the way he dealt with them that was potentially imagined. And secondly and more importantly, the time that has passed over the course of the movie is about 2-3 days, I recall having seen nighttime thrice, which in real time, would mean the corpse would have well begun it's process of rotting and would not maintain it's shape and form as shown in the movie. All of this further displaces the movie from one of any definite meaning to one of a mere exploration of a man's descent to insanity and society's subsequent introductory treatment of said maniac.

What if I told you that hank was dead when he hung himself? That everything else was just his brain's last thoughts before he was 100% dead? Idk, just my takeaway from it.

I don't think everyone saw Manny jet-ski off. Hank just imagined it to convince himself he wasn't crazy. That's my take.