Hallow Road (2025) Ending Explained - Is It Grief or Something More Interesting?

Welcome to Knockout Horror. If you are new here, we review horror movies, explain horror movie endings, and put out horror movie ranking lists. Today, we are going to be explaining the ending to a bit of a confusing horror, thriller in the form of Hallow Road (2025).

I recently explained the ending to the sci-fi, alien themed, horror movie Descendent. That article has been insanely popular which kind of got me to thinking. Are these writers just knocking it out of the park when it comes to cleverly ambiguous stories or are they just doing such a terrible job that people are left completely confused.

So many horror stories act as allegories for one thing or another that it’s hard to know whether the monsters are real or all in the person’s head. To be honest, Hallow Road is no exception. It’s another film that is both literal and metaphorical so let’s take a look. As always, this article contains spoilers.

Hmmm…

I should interject before we start as this article has been ridiculously popular and with popularity comes criticism. A specific reader messaged me to claim that I have, apparently, completely missed the obvious explanation here that’s actively stated in the film, somewhere.

I am waiting on a reply to clarify what I supposedly missed because I am a bit confused. Particularly when you considered the writer and director intended the film to be ambiguous and open for interpretation. I genuinely believe there is no concrete ending explanation to this film. Only a possible explanation and a likely explanation. They wanted people to write articles and make videos about this movie and they succeeded.

I have pre-emptively skimmed through and added a few extra bits to clarify some stuff that might not have been too clear. I guess I sold a few points short in an effort to keep the article tight and fairly short. Still, I am very curious and will update if I actually did miss something.

A Quick Recap

Let’s quickly recap the story of Hallow Road to get up to date. This shouldn’t take long as virtually nothing happens. I’m then going to go into a couple of theories on the ending. One is, probably, the actual explanation, as pretentious as that is, and the other is something a little more elaborate based on some spooky supernatural and superstitious stuff.

Quick aside, here. Can you believe this movie takes 5 minutes to even get to the actual opening? We kick things off with Madison (Rosamund Pike) waking up due to the fire alarm beeping because of a low battery. Her husband, Frank (Matthew Rhys) has fallen asleep at his desk. The pair have had an argument with their daughter, Alice, who revealed to them that she was pregnant.

As things escalated, she stormed off, taking Frank’s car in the process. Madison receives a call from Alice at 2am. Alice has been in an accident in her car. Frank and Madison immediately jump into their car to head to the scene. Alice gives them the location and they start driving.

A Long, Dull, Journey

The next 40 minutes, or so, are a pretty much real time trip to the scene. Frank is, obviously, not that concerned because he takes his damn time getting there. Anyways, Alice says she has hit a young girl with her car and crashed into a ditch. Madison, a paramedic, tells Alice to help the girl and gives her instructions on CPR. While performing CPR, Alice feels the girl’s chest cave in.

Alice, harrowed, eventually gives up with CPR and the call ends. The pair try to get back in touch with her but she doesn’t answer. Frank and Madison squabble. Madison has started smoking again, just one of the many secrets between the pair that will come into play later on. They eventually get in touch with Alice again and we get the full story.

Alice headed off into the woods because she didn’t want to return home because of the argument with her parents but also didn’t want to tell her boyfriend that she was pregnant so felt she had no place to go. She had been driving too fast while impaired on MDMA. Presumably she had gotten high to, err, I don’t know, have a mini rave in the woods to make herself feel better.. While pregnant.

Apparently the girl stepped out and Alice hit her. Obviously, this is a conundrum because this would mean Alice would be in serious legal trouble due to being impaired and killing someone. This would impact her university placement, upcoming year in Australia, pregnancy, and future prospects. We also learn that Alice never called the police in the first place.

Frank’s Solution

Frank suggests that Alice waits for them to arrive. When they arrive, Alice can leave in the car with Madison while Frank stays at the scene. When the police arrive, he can take the blame for hitting the girl. Because he wasn’t impaired, the death would go down as an accident. I am sure they would be able to tell that the girl had been dead already for over an hour. Not a great plan.

I can’t believe we are only half an hour in. I need to speed this recap up. At the 39 minute point, we get the first hint of what I think the supernatural, folklore related, explanation for this plot is. We’ll talk about that in a little. Alice thinks she sees the headlights of her parents car so turns her lights on to signal where she is.

This alarms Frank as he knows they aren’t there yet, meaning it can’t possibly be them. Alice needs to not be seen so that they can put Frank’s plan into action so they tell her to move the body and hide. Alice does but she leaves the girl’s shoe in the road. As she moves the girl, she claims that her face started changing.

The people in the car stop. They come over and talk to Alice, chastising her for being high and hiding in the woods. The people eventually chat to Alice’s parents on the phone who convince them to leave. They start to leave but, eventually, stop at the side of the road and recover the body. This prompts Alice to panic and attempt to escape, eventually hanging up the phone.

It All Gets a Bit Weird

When the two get back in touch with Alice, the woman, rather than their daughter, answers. She says that they had to break into the car to take Alice’s keys and that the girl that Alice hit was completely fine. Frank explains his plan to take the blame to protect his child, hoping the rather menacing couple are parents and will empathise.

The woman acts as though she understands and relates how her and her husband have been atoning for their own sins towards their child for a long time. They allow Frank and Madison to chat with Alice who is completely confused at how the girl survived. Madison tells Alice about how you can make mistakes with this type of thing. She tells her how she misdiagnosed a woman who appeared to be suffering a panic attack which lead to the woman dying.

Alice relates how the girl looked just like herself. The couple eventually arrive at Hallow Grove and find Alice’s car. There is a body in front of it but, to the couple’s surprise, it is Alice’s body. Remembering that Alice said that the girl looked just like her, they begin to race through the forest to try and find Alice. The whole time, they hear Alice pleading with the mysterious couple to let her go.

Eventually, a police car turns up, blocking them from going any further. We fast forward to the next morning and the police are talking about what happened. Alice was driving high, crashed, walked around in a daze, and was hit by a car and killed. Her body was dragged off the road, leaving one shoe, and the person who hit her drove off.

The parent’s claim that the story was impossible because they were talking to Alice on the phone. The police officers put that down to trauma, understandable given the circumstance.

The Likely Explanation

Right, time to explain the ending. Full disclosure, I don’t think this is the most interesting explanation for the plot but it is probably the most likely. I would love to think that Hallow Road is, actually, a supernatural horror movie with a full blown folklore themed explanation but something important suggests that it isn’t and I will explain that in a little.

Let’s assume that Alice crashes the car. She is high on MDMA, driving too fast, upset after her argument because her parents suggested an abortion, doesn’t want to go home and tell her boyfriend about the baby, and is driving too fast. She swerves off the road after thinking she saw someone (she’s high, remember), hits the tree stump, and wedges her car in so is unable to leave.

The first thing she does is to call her parents. She tells them where she is and what has happened including the fact that she thinks she hit someone. Her mother tells her to get out of the car and perform CPR. Alice gets out of the car and the phone goes dead because Alice is hit by a car. This person pulls Alice’s body off the road and leaves the scene. Alice is now dead for the entire movie.

The Parents Race To The Scene

Just to clarify, some of that might not have happened. Alice may not have thought she hit someone, she may have just gotten out of the car and wandered around. It doesn’t really matter because it is never clarified. All we know is that the parents find out that she has been in an accident and they know where she is so make their way there.

Everything we see from there on out is either a hallucination or a trauma response by the parents. As they drive to find Alice, in their helplessness, they start imagining the worst case scenario. Remember, they caused her to run out of the house due to the argument so they feel responsible for her predicament. Shattered by guilt and sadness, their minds conjure up a more acceptable reality to soften the blow of losing their child.

It is all just an allegory and a metaphorical representation of the guilt the parents feel at failing their child and the sense of helplessness when it comes to trying to guide said child through young adulthood. There is no mysterious couple, Alice never performs CPR, there is no dead girl in the road, only Alice, it is all just a creative visual depiction of guilt and grief.

The Parents Can’t Cope

Everything we see from the first time the phone cuts off after Alice tells them where she is, right through the the end where they find her body, is a trauma response. The parents can’t get in touch with Alice, they race to her location (kind of race, anyways) and find her dead.

Madison is already deeply traumatised by her inaction leading to a death at work. She is taking Citalopram, which is an anti-depressant, not coping with the grief and guilt, and has quit her job. Both parents are control freaks but both have different ways of doing things. Frank wants to be hands on but Madison has deprived him of that control by lying to him and hiding secrets.

Madison has started smoking again, she hasn’t told Frank that she lost her job, she is increasingly distant, she has been hiding that Madison is taking drugs, and she has been mentally drifting away from her husband, as evidenced by the text message that she has to correct from “me” to “us” when talking to Alice.

Rather than confront the revelation of Alice’s pregnancy sensibly, Madison and Frank both flew off the handle. They told Alice that she needs to inform her partner and they suggested she abort the baby. The pair tell her that a baby will ruin her life.

This upset Alice as she knows they had her when they were still very young. This makes Alice feel as though she was unwanted and, in turn, ruined their life. She storms out in anger and hurt. Her parents don’t follow her or make any attempt to get in touch with her.

The Mysterious Couple Weren’t Real

All of their guilt at their inadequacies becomes overwhelming. They feel as though they caused Alice to run and did nothing to help fix the situation. There’s a careful balancing act when it comes to parenting. It’s important to weigh up discipline with compassion and to work together. Frank and Maddie never did this.

Alice has a pattern of getting into trouble. Her father enables her bad behaviour while her mother is too strict. By not working together, lying to each other, refusing to hold Alice accountable to any of her actions, and by not helping her, they became her monster.

The mysterious couple on the phone with Alice were, basically, a manifestation (so not real) of Frank and Madison’s guilt for not doing the right thing. The “Kind Woman” actually holds Alice accountable for her actions and helps the supposed ailing girl who was hit by Alice. Relating that the girl was actually fine the whole time and how she was going to correct Alice.

The kind woman is, basically, a manifestation of Maddie’s own fractured psyche. This is, kind of, the big giveaway that this is the real explanation for the ending. Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys, who play Alice’s parents, also provide the voices for the couple on the phone. That’s the big “ohhh right” moment in this film.

The couple never existed, it was just a manifestation of the character’s guilt at failing their child. An indicator that the couple feel as though it was them that killed Alice through their poor parenting. If they would have worked together, balanced compassion with discipline, and tried to be more understanding, this wouldn’t have happened.

It’s a Metaphor for Grief

There is the constant posing of the question “how far will they go to save their child” but it is kind of rhetorical. They have no chance to save her now and the parents, particularly Madison, are struggling to come to terms with that fact. They feel like they, ultimately, didn’t do enough but that is the tough part of parenthood.

Which approach was right and how do you avoid the almost inevitable failure? Madison asking for one more chance is a reflection of this guilt and how she would change things if she could. She would do whatever she could to save Alice if she had another try.

When they arrive and find Alice dead, they go into a fight or flight panic response as indicated by them driving wildly through the woods in denial. They are eventually confronted with reality when they encounter the police and slip into silence as they try to make sense of the situation. As someone who has experienced the sudden death of a loved one, it does become all the more real when the police appear.

The police officer, basically, confirms the reality by saying Alice was hit by a car. The officers talking about the couple acts as a conduit to highlight the feelings of denial that are so common when something tragic like this happens.

None of the spooky stuff here happened, it was all metaphorical or in the couple’s heads. The entire car journey consisted of the pair arguing and panicking about what had happened. They couldn’t get in touch with Alice the entire journey as she was already dead. The calls they had with her were either hallucinated or misremembered as a trauma response.

The best way to think about it is that way we will relentlessly go over things in our heads after they happen. Picturing how we might have done things differently and manifesting an outcome where we were or weren’t to blame. Not all that satisfying, right? I am real sick of these metaphorical horror movies so let’s try and make it a bit more interesting.

But Wait.. Just One More Thing

Before we get onto the more entertaining explanation, what about the possibility that it was Maddie and Frank that killed Alice? Alice stole Frank’s car, they jumped into their Jeep and pursued her into the forest. Alice saw their car approaching in the distance and tried to flag them down. They didn’t see her and hit her with their car, killing her instantly.

Maddie tried to perform CPR but was unsuccessful. Frank dragged Alice off the road and they left the scene. Eventually falling asleep and waking hours later to replay the entire thing. Trauma blanked their memories and they weaved a scenario where they attempted to save her. The mysterious couple were just the reflections of Maddie’s guilt at not being able to help their daughter.

Well, for one, their car wasn’t damaged. You can’t hit a human and not damage your car, it’s impossible. I work on cars a lot as a hobby. Even leaning into the engine bay with too much force will put a dent in the car. There would have been evidence at the scene to indicate this reality and the police would have been on them like white on rice. It’s a very cool possibility but poorly supported.

The More Entertaining Ending Explained

We see so many films like The Babadook and Relic, where the monsters are metaphorical and the horror is an allegory for a real life situation, that we are kind of used to it now. We are expecting it. But what if horror writers were now using that to subvert expectation? What if this wasn’t a dull metaphorical waste of time?

What if we are getting so lost in the metaphorical and allegorical stuff that we are missing straight up stories of the supernatural. Just like how Descendent was an actual story about alien abduction, what if Hallow Road was an actual story about the supernatural. Everything we see in the movie really happens but the reason for it is a little more spooky than you might think.

Let’s discuss a far more interesting, hypothetical, potentially correct explanation for the story. Ignore all the pregnancy stuff, the parent’s guilt, Madison’s work incident, the lies, the drugs, all of that. It’s only relevant to the plot in as much as that is what made Alice head to the woods in the first place. As soon as Alice ends up in the woods, she has found herself in a world of trouble.

The Supernatural Explanation

You are going to have to forgive me rambling a bit here. Let’s just say, I am Welsh with a hell of a lot of Irish heritage so was kinda brought up on Celtic folklore so I may go completely off base with this explanation but the movie was made in Ireland so maybe that lends a bit of credence.

First thing’s first, let’s note the date that this whole event takes place. It is October 31st – Halloween or as it is was originally known – All Hallows’ Eve. Notice how the road is called Hallow Road, as well? All Hallows’ Eve was the one time in a year where the barrier between the human world and the spirit world thinned. This allowed spirits to enter the human world. Some were good, some were bad.

Now, traditionally, we would light bonfires to scare the spirits off or we would wear masks so that we could blend in with the spirits so they wouldn’t harm us. But what if you don’t do any of that? Well, you may find yourself in the same situation as Alice if superstitions and folklore are to be believed.

In this scenario, should this explanation be accurate, Alice came across some malicious spirits due to heading into an unmarked road but what type? Well, I think we have a few. Firstly, Alice thought she hit a girl and when she tried to perform CPR on her, her chest caved in. She also said that this girl looked just like her; also, remember when she saw headlights which got her out of the car? All of this is important.

Fairies, Changelings, and Will-O’-The-Wisps – Oh My!

Time to answer a few questions. When Alice thought she hit someone, she actually did. When she performed CPR on someone, their chest really did cave in and the explanation is quite simple. Alice hit a changeling. In Celtic folklore, changelings are, often, left by a particular type of malicious spirit and for good reason which we will get into in just a second.

Changelings are, frequently, enchanted old logs and trees made to look like humans. Remember all the visual references to logs and wood surrounding Alice? The changeling was made of wood which then caved in while Alice tried to perform CPR. This prompted her to get back into her car our of fear. The changeling remained there. The next reason she left her car was seeing headlights because she thought the headlights belonged to her parents.

The headlights weren’t headlights at all, they were Will-O’-The-Wisps. Will-O’-The-Wisps, in Welsh folklore, at least, are also known as “Fairy Fire”. This Fairy Fire is held my mischievous fairies to lead travellers off the beaten path at night and lure them to their doom. Typically, they would be found deep in the woods.

But who was orchestrating all of this? Well, it was fairies. Fairies created a changeling to force Alice to crash. When she crashed and tried CPR, the changeling’s chest caved in, Alice got scared and headed back to her car. The fairies then used their Will-O’-The-Wisps to lure her back out of the car but why did they do this?

Why Fairies, Why?

The reason is quite simple, in Celtic folklore, Fairies are known for kidnapping people and, in their place, leaving changelings. This is particularly true of new or expectant mothers. The fairies kidnap people and marry them off to other fairies or use the new parents to raise their fairy babies.

The fairies, quite simply, wanted to kidnap the pregnant Alice and have her raise their children. In turn, the would raise Alice’s child and use that child to raise more of their fairy children. Alice was taken to the fairy’s world which, we can assume, would be past the spiritual barrier that was thinned due to this being All Hallows’ Eve, and the parents hear Alice pleading on the phone as she is taken away.

The fairies leave a changeling with Alice’s face on the side of the road. The parents find the changeling, Alice is taken away, the police rule it to be a hit and run death, and the parents are left to live the rest of their lives knowing the real explanation.

Wouldn’t That Be More Interesting?

That would be a much more satisfying answer. There is also the possibility of parallel dimensions and the mysterious couple are an alternate version of Maddie and Frank. This article is already too long, though.

I wish the metaphorical, allegorical, horror movies would take a long walk off a short pier. You can almost imagine the writer and director taking a long slow sniff of their own farts and feeling incredibly proud of themselves. Believing full well they have subverted expectation and not made some derivative crap.

I want my actual horror back. Give me some supernatural stories with changelings, fairies, and Will-O’-The-Wisps. Is it really too much to ask? Great, the parents were suffering grief and it was all in their heads. So original! You don’t need a map to the location horror writers; simply pick a part of my ass and pucker up. Anyways, thanks for reading and spending your time at Knockout Horror.

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