Note: This story contains spoilers for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Nothing about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s fairy-tale ending should go down easy. The film coils together so many meta layers of reality—from real-world film history, from writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s past and personal foibles, and from our own grim knowledge of what really happened on Cielo Drive on August 9, 1969—that its final minutes become something of a cinematic Rorschach test.