"They deserved it." - "I know" - huh?

I agree that it was...different. I would like to think that it was more about, after having walked in her shoes, the young girl being sympathetic to her frame of mind...to her plight.
Because the film didn't portray the ghosts as being evil after all, they were just looking for help in...well, now that I think about it, either being released from their prison or in seeking justice for their killer. At least at the end there. Know what I mean?

If the movie was trying to justify the idea that Johns are worthy of death, I don't think they'd have allowed the viewer to view their ghosts in any kind of sympathetic light.

So it leads me to think that maybe she said "I know" as a matter of empathy...of seeing how Sandy (remembered a name!!) had been broken by all of it. Sandy didn't need to justify her actions to little whatsername because little whatsername had lived it...had first-person experience of how the unfolding of events had broken her. That's my own justification for it, anyway.

Yep, I laughed out loud for that line.

But you have to remember the protagonist is an idiot. She believe the old man is a murder, but doesn't bother to ask anyone in the bar "what is his name?"

She is so dumb, go to police without ask the name first. And the Taxi driver is an idiot too: crash someone in middle of road. The old lady is an idiot, in the split second, she suddenly find her conscience for what? A slap on her face?

And the house is magical, ton of dead bodies can hide under wooden wall without the smell.

He wasn't the only one. We saw all kinds of hints (or I did) that the other guys began to drug her and take advantage each time they came back, 'til she could no longer stand it. The fact that they are being tormented also hints at that.

I don’t think she was getting new clients and continuing work as a prostitute other than using it to get her former clients back to the house to murder them. She killed the men whom she was forced or coerced into having sex with while caught in the world of her pimp. She didn’t then carry on with new men.

The Christie murders some 20 years before show that in a post war London house you can hide bodies for ages. The smell goes away after a while but the key factor is how cold these houses were. It’s difficult to imagine now in our modern age, but prior to the 80’s very few houses like that had central heating, or even hot water. They are dark, cold houses. Both my mother and mother in law tell stories of waking up in winter to ice on the inside of windows, frozen condensation. That’s why everyone wore thick clothes and thick bed covers.
The only heat was coal fires in the front room.

The confusion I found was whether I was supposed to feel sorry for these men, trapped in some sort of limbo. One could argue they were just men partaking in the world’s oldest profession or that they were essentially rapists who knew exactly what they were doing. Presumably adulterers too.

As Don Corleone said to Amerigo Bonasera in “The Godfather” when Amerigo asked Don Vito to kill the men who beat his daughter til one inch of her life. He was demanding “justice” but Vito would have none of it. “That’s not justice, your daughter still lives”

Those men Sandie murdered never hurt her or of course killed her, so her killing them wasn’t justice in the least. She was never beat, maimed, disfigured or otherwise hurt & there’s no indication none of them bothered her afterwards so it’s hard to sympathize much for her.

Only that wing nut Eloise did because she idolized her, but she was wrong. She too could’ve used this logic but she wouldn’t.

Yeah, it was definitely a strange moment. I was asking myself if the film was seriously expecting to audience to agree with this sentiment. Killing Jack was definitely justified but when she decided to become a bloodthirsty, serial killer when she could have walked away.

It is the current feminist attitude: all Johns are seen as monsters.

Yeah, that was bizarre.

The movie does a really great job of setting up the predatory world that a lot/most/all young women find themselves in when entering into adulthood and/or moving to an unknown area. The creep cabbie, the way every guy seems to leer, the way a simple interaction can be big trouble... all handled deftly. I also really liked that the movie subtly showed how not all of these interactions are poisonous. Ellie is mistrustful of John when she first sees him because she's fresh out of the pervert's cab, but later on we see that John is a pretty decent fellow.

As we see what happened to Sandy, the movie keeps up a really great theme, showing the compromises that are sometimes made in a sleazy world. She's the meat in a meat market, and it's crushing the soul out of her.

But, aside from violence and false promises from Jack, the "customers" Sandy sees are just looking for an uncomplicated night out. We don't see them beat her. We don't see them engage in risky behaviour that she didn't agree to. We the viewers know that she's miserable, but she could have just walked away. She could have gotten another manager. She could have taken an acting class or singing lesson. She could have gotten a day job and done some gigs on the side. But she didn't do that. She kept being a prostitute.

So, as you say, at the end, when Ellie agrees that the murder victims deserved it, it seemed like the movie took all of its theme building throughout - about the predatory world young, beautiful women find themselves in - and dashed it to pieces by declaring that any guy who pays a hooker deserves to be killed.

It's weird that there's this two-faced part to 21st century feminism, declaring men to be sick perverts for lusting after women while loudly declaring that "sex work is real work". If sex work is real work then you can't start hating on the customers.