I just watch the movie and it took me a few minutes to figure it out but here it goes.
The Rule of Three is about karma…like bad things happen to bad people. Here’s how I have analyzed it now I have to start backwards a bit but here you go.
The so called “loving” father of the teen “Lo” was molesting her, probably for awhile. Years pass and maybe he is still doing it or maybe he stopped, either way, it happened. Ok so, she goes to a hotel room with her boyfriend and a threesome ensues, she also in passing while they are kissing tells him “I use to be with a guy that called me “Cupcakes.” She immediately calls her father wanting to tell something, what she did, that she had sex with another girl. Anyways sometime earlier before all that occurs a man stays in the exact same hotel room as Lo and Jake her boyfriend. He finds a dealer to get date rape drugs and they meet up there, it obviously all goes wrong and the women winds up dead, but they left her earring behind. Cut back to the present, Lo and Jake are staying in the hotel room where and the dealer shows up to try and collect the earring. Jake gives it to him but mentions there is blood on it. That is when the dealer gets paranoid in fear he’ll be caught if they don’t get rid of the rest of the witnesses to the murder. So they kill Jake and Lo. When they are cleaning up their mess they find Lo’s diary (which you see her writing in in the middle of the movie when the hotel service guy asks her if she’s locked out and then says “have fun) and read that her father and her had a relationship, so fate would have it that there was something like that in the journal that could be used to blackmail the father into not looking into any further detail about his missing daughter. Then cut back to the father waiting in the hotel room, with his wife. He gets the note and says “they found her diary and know what he did” he then opens the box of cupcakes, the mother obviously recalls a time where the father called their daughter “cupcake” or “cupcakes” so she exclaims “What did you do!?” So basically, the drug dealer and older man were able to blackmail the father based on the evidence they found in the girl’s diary. Cue credits.
The movie is about karma, do something bad to someone else and something bad will happen to you. “Karma’s a bitch” as the saying goes. And if you notice the number 3 is present everywhere…“meeting” the father at 3….the clock reading 1:11 in the beginning, the whole “threesome” things both times, with the older man, dealer and woman and again with Lo, Jake and Dana.
As far as what happens from there, or what happened from the time after you see the dealer bashing Lo’s boyfriend’s head in with the telephone, is left up the viewer’s imagination, because they wanna stay focused in the “karma’ aspect of the film.
Hope that helps!
Mel ;)