what happened at the end of scenic route??

This info should help http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2012011/board/?ref_=tt…

Scenic Route Movie

Last half film.Guys never got out hole once they got in it.Mitchell looks at map.Points to front of truck n says thats direction of sunset(west)they venture off east in early morning darkness. They get approx 1000m from truck and morning has sunrise.Yet shadows cast east(same direction as back o truck)meaning time is all over the place like a dream.mistake2 mitchells visions his mates sunglasses lost a lense,but we know his glasses never broke in reality.Mistake3 the watertank they drink has no lid n is not a sealed tank.no water in that tank.mistake4 eagle pic in his workspace is in foyer as he leaves.his anxiouty builds his stress levels start to bring him back to reality and his happy dream ends as he relises hes dead in a hole

I watched Scenic Route last night just to answer this question. It appears that the ending is purposefully ambiguous. I think that enough data was given for someone to make a call in either direction. Let’s go over what I came up with

They lived

They both heard the phone ring. Normally one person will hallucinate and trigger another person to also hallucinate the same thing, but in this case they both heard the phone at the same time.

An ambulance came to get them instead of a helicopter. If you were hallucinating, you would most likely think about a faster way to get saved

There were a lot of scenes after they left the desert. These scenes were not flashes, but played out scenes with both happy and sad emotions which might be expected after a traumatic event

We see Mitchell being unhappy at his wife’s parents house. He is sitting in the hallway and his son comes up to him and they go into the dining room with everyone else. If you were hallucinating about escaping hell, why hallucinate about sadness?

It’s common for PTSD to occur after a traumatic event which explains Mitchell’s concerns about not actually leaving the desert.

They died

They drank washer fluid from the truck which contains methanol. Methanol if highly toxic in small amounts.

They were dehydrated for 3 days that we saw.

Subjected to major temperature swings for 3 days

A lot of blood loss

The phone rang when they were in the ghost town. If the phone had no signal near the road, why would they have it even further into the desert.

When Mitchell called Carter toward the end, Carter started to say, “It’s funny you say that” and the line went dead. Mitchell got mad and threw the phone. When he picked it up, it was cracked just like it had been cracked out in the desert.

Mitchell still had a scab line where is nose was broken. Broken noses can heal within 3 weeks so this means that within 3 weeks of leaving the desert, Mitchell convinced his wife to let Carter move in with them, Mitchell quit his job to become a rock star, Carter finished a book and Mitchell and his wife decided to just pickup and travel the world. Not only that, but within 3 weeks, Carter got a new car (be it, a used one) but he had no money as made clear during the first half of the movie.

The kicker is the very last part where Mitchell has a flashback of them being in the hole and then crying. This is the reason I say the ending is ambiguous. Does it mean that he was flashing back to them being in the hole and he is sad that it happened and happy he survived or does it mean that the “flashback” is actually showing reality of them dead in the hole and he is crying because he knows he has died?

I’m sure my points can be argued, but it’s mostly to show that there is no definitive answer from what I saw and I was watching specifically to answer this question.