The Deer Hunter Ending Explained: What Happened To Nick?

Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter was a Best Picture winner and war epic that followed three childhood friends from a blue-collar town in Pennsylvania, Michael (Robert De Niro), Steven (John Savage), and Nick (Christopher Walken) over the course of the Vietnam War. The Deer Hunter is a true story for soldiers who lived its harrowing narrative, with an ending that remains one of the most shattering pieces of cinema forty years later. The movie does not hold back from exposing the atrocities of combat and their effects on the human psyche, particularly for Nick, its most fragile character who disappears into the underground gambling world of Saigon after the war.