Or
they wanted to stun audiences and just had a "shocking" turn for "shocking" turn's sake. It didn't have to make sense.

Wrecking a beautiful marriage? Of an old guy falling in love with an 11 year old and getting together with her as soon as it's legal? How beautiful.
This ending confuses people because the film is poorly written and directed. There are no scenes showing Hackman as a broken man. No scenes showing him being brainwashed. None showing him being confused about what happened. This ending could have worked well had the interrogation been intense and shattering enough that he started to believe he had done it, or he felt he had option. The ending felt tacked on, nothing to do with the film I'd just watched, and I found it infuriating. I felt tricked, it felt dishonest. It was just incredibly badly done.

Wait! Hugh Jackman was in the film?! I missed that completely.
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Hackman and Freeman are/were not best friends. They knew each other for years, true, but the were not friends. Freeman was the young man who worked hard to survive and couldnt go to university, while Hackman was the golden boy who threw away money and had girlfriends on each finger. Hackmans character mentioned that and said Freeman was after him to take revenge for that.

at the begining they ask him about the dog because he says "we found the body", a couple other times in the movie he says "we" when referring to the crime (i believe even during the interrogation when they announce the other killer)

If that's the true explanation, then I consider it a poor ending, because I don't buy for one second that Hackman's character confesses under the those circumstances.

^^^ This. I thought I was the only one that interpreted this film in this way.
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I think you are absolutely correct!
Just saw the movie not half an hour ago.
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@jmrc Are you recalling the storyline of the original French film? Because if you are summarizing THIS version, I wholeheartedly disagree with the notion that Hackman confessed because he wanted to protect his wife.
(In this version) you leave out that the girls were raped (from behind) before they were murdered; would it really be plausible, at all, that a lawyer would jump to such a ridiculous conclusion, that his wife would have gone through so much - luring girls, raping them with a phallic object that had a condom on it (remember the police could tell there were condoms used with both victims), killing them, then posing their bodies - to set up the husband on the off chance that he would be investigated the way he was? Remember, the movie starts out with Hackman's character asked to stop by the police station "for no longer than 10 minutes" to clear up his prior statement. Hackman would know that Bellucci's character had no way of knowing how the police would go about their investigation.
Hackman wasn't protecting his wife by confessing, he had become a broken, lonely man, who knew there was no one he could turn to for support, so he began confessing to a crime he didn't commit because he realized how much his wife truly despised him, and to make the interrogation stop.

Okay, I replied to the OP before reading jmrc's post, which would certainly better explain Hackmans confession. As it played out, I was wondering if he was confessing to protect her, because the whole movie I was thinking, surely shes not the killer.
In any case, it still does not seem very plausible to me that he was all of a sudden so convinced that she was the killer, that he would just start rattling off a confession.

@jmrcCongratulations you said it better than anyone else on these boards you kept it simple I have not seen it yet and will watch it later today. I could not believe so many left out just what went on between her and her husband at the end, in all of these writings.

As someone in another thread mentioned, Garde a Vu, the film on which this film is based (as well as the novel Brainwashed) ends with the wife committing suicide. And I don't know how anyone in any of these threads cannot see that that was the original ending of the American version - clearly, she goes up on a hill and is poised to jump. I think the film tested poorly (this is truly one of the lowest-grossing pictures in the history of film) and the little coda with Hackman and her was added. Just watch - she's getting ready to jump from a great height.

Sorry, that's not what I think the end is about at all. And if Morgan Freeman says otherwise in the commentary, then I'm pretty sure he didn't get the message of the original French film either.
He confessed to the murder because he thought his wife had killed the girls out of jealousy after seeing their photographs and knowing he talked to them. That's why he says 'I never thought she would go to such lengths'. He lied to protect her.
He knows she is extremely jealous of him because he is aware he did nothing with her niece and never intended to. His recollection of what happened at Christmas is totally true while hers is only her twisted interpretation of what really happened, fabricated by her own insecurity and fueled by what her mother had told her all those years ago: "there is always someone younger, someone prettier".
When he confesses to a murder he did not commit, his wife really believes he is the murderer and that validates her jealousy, which is why she spits at him through the glass.
It's only when the real murderer is caught that she (and Freeman) realize that he was only assuming himself as the murderer to protect her. She finally realizes how much he really loves her - so much that he would take the fall for murdering two innocent little girls in order to protect her.
By realizing this she must now face her own guilt and the fact that she, and she alone, had destroyed their lives based on something that had never happened except on her own jealous imagination.
So she finally goes to him - but by now it's too late and he rejects her. She alone had destroyed that which she wanted so much - as unfounded jealousy always does.

sporthub,
Were Freeman and Hackman best friends? I got the impression that they were friends, but mainly through the justice system, Hackman a lawyer, Freeman in the police. It's a small island, so they saw a lot of each other, but I didn't get the best friends impression.
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Excellent summation. I wasn't exactly sure what happened at the end. Now I realise that the wife had inflicted tremendous cruelty on her husband and that the husband had come to see it and finally had had enough of her behavior towards him.
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I actually agree with this. Just because he didn't murder those girls doesn't mean he's not attracted to children. It was heavily implied that he fell in love with his wife when she was a young child, he admits to liking women who look underage, and he talks to freeman about it as if every man would shag teenagers if given the opportunity. He clearly has an issue.

were you actually watching this movie?

It's interesting that the wife's character is criticized for her jealousy. Her husband was engaged, actively, in sexual behaviors (rough trade, in fact) with, essentially, children. She was college educated and saw her husband in a compromising positionsitting on the bed, remember, with an underage girl, taking her picture, with a history of having sex with young girls. This type of behavior does not usually arise all of a sudden, but is habitual. Molesters habitually molest. The wife was not eaten up by jealousy, I think, but she knew or intuited that her husband had this pedophile tendency. Perhaps that's why she refused to have children and why she was vigilant for her niece. Let's criticize the Hearst character for his flaws, not his wife.

I stopped reading when I noticed you were too lazy to spell out the words
with
and
because
. Thanks for trying, though.
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i actually took that statement as to mean "if he's the killer then he is a monster", but if he is not the killer then he would be a very bad person to have suing you in court, for wrongful prosecution, as in a 'monster of an opponent in court' that he would not be the person you would want to have against you .

actually, daphne what he says is that they should hope he's guilty because if he is he's the monster however if he is not, someone else (the police) becomes the monster

I really believe this is the case:
They have someone else kill the 3rd girl and had him caught red handed on purpose.
On the party where Henry has his speech he talks to the host and says something like: "make sure they catch the right monster, otherwise the monster will turn against you." meaning he has so much power on the island that the host will do anything to keep him out of jail.
He is so powerfull that someone else turns up for his crime.

Monica Belucci, with every indication of perfect casting.