Hallow Road (2025) Ending Explained

Warning! This Hallow Road ending explainer contains spoilers. Proceed at your own peril!

Yesterday evening, I had the pleasure of catching up with a friend for some Korean food in Melbourne’s Chinatown, before heading around the corner to the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF). The horror selection this year is dynamite, with locally made products like war/horror hybrid Beast of War and 1922’s Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead slotting in alongside international efforts such as It Ends and Touch Me.

There’s also been short films and re-runs of old classics like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), plus a huge range of horror/comedy mashups: including the killer fizz of Zombucha!, Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover, and the shlocky, slimy silliness of Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger all gracing the bill.

What we saw last night, however, had no intention of trucking with any elements beyond dread, suspense, shock, and a mounting sense of desolation. This was a tense, taut, tightly wound thriller that – unfolding over a snappy 80-minute runtime and, for all intents and purposes, in a single location – has no designs on either explaining its ending or leaving viewers with a happy one.

That film is, of course, Babak Anvari’s Hallow Road (2025). Early reviews have been excellent: largely down to the film’s menace and minimalism, as well as the engrossing, engaging masterclasses in acting the leads Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys both put on. Both tonally and in the quality of the finished product, Hallow Road is far closer to Anvari’s previous efforts Under the Shadow (2016) and I Came By (2022) than the disappointing Wounds (2019) or History of Evil (2024) – and it might just be his best film yet.

What I really want to do with this piece is explain Hallow Road’s ambiguous ending – but to do that, it makes sense to quickly unpack the plot first. That said, if you’re like me and fresh out of the cinema after seeing Hallow Road, scroll down to the “Hallow Road Ending Explained” section below to dive into its multiple interpretations.

Hallow Road (2025) Plot Summary (Spoilers)

The plot unfolds over the course of a few hours, as anxious parents Maddie (Pike) and Frank Finch (Rhys) are woken in the middle of the night by a distressed call from their 18-year-old daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell). As revealed throughout the film, Alice had left her parents’ house earlier that night after an argument around her future.

Rosamund Pike as Maddie Finch in Hallow Road (2025)

Alice is pregnant with her Czech boyfriend Jakob, who she shares a flat with out of town, and wants to have the baby; her parents don’t believe she’s ready for the responsibility, and have a different idea of how Alice’s future should pan out.

When Maddie picks up the phone at 2am, though, Alice’s distress is due to a wholly different factor: driving through Ireland’s (fictional) Ashfolk forest – ostensibly on her way back to her flat – she has collided with someone crossing the road. Alice claims that the girl jumped out in front of her, but – as her parents jump in the car and begin to drive straight to Alice’s location – we gradually learn that Alice was high on MDMA; the consequences will be severe.

Guided by her paramedic mum over the phone as the couple race to the scene, Alice unsuccessfully attempts to give the girl CPR, before a sickening sound through the parents’ speakerphone tells us Alice’s palms have gone through the girls’ chest cavity. Here, we get an exploration of Maddie and Frank’s respective responses to the mounting panic: while Maddie implores Alice to call an ambulance and avoid moving the body, Frank tells her to wait in the car until they arrive. All this, by the way, we see only from the parents’ perspective: the most we see of Alice during all this is her WhatsApp picture on the dashboard-mounted phone of her folks’ car.

We later learn that, despite Alice claiming she has called the ambulance, she’s done no such thing at all – that was simply a ploy to seek help from her mum, and an in-the-moment panic response to avoid facing the implications of what she’s done.

Initially, it looks as if these themes – guilt, parental responsibility, accountability – will be the main horror Hallow Road deals with, but then things change as Alice (again, only reporting this information; we never see it first-hand) sees headlights approaching. By the sounds of them, it’s an older, kindly couple, who at first only ask Alice gently inquisitive questions about what she’s doing out there at night, in the middle of an isolated forest.

The affect of the lady, though – who is voiced, in an interesting aspect we’ll discuss later in this piece, by Rosamund Pike – soon begins to change: warping into something more menacing and interrogative and judgmental.

As Frank and Maddie – still making their way to the scene amid a faltering GPS and the dark, featureless network of Irish back country roads – listen on, the unnamed woman deduces that Alice is intoxicated. The woman first reports that the girl Alice hit isn’t dead, before smashing the window of her car as Frank and Maddie scream. The call cuts off.

When Maddie and Frank are able to get in touch with Alice again, she has calmed down a bit; the woman says she only broke into the car to retrieve Alice’s keys so she wouldn’t end up hurting anyone else. At this stage, the terror is still, for the most part, natural – there are no elements to suggest any demonic or paranormal influences. Except, perhaps, for one moment, before the older couple arrive. Through the Finches’ phone’s speaker, we hear a strange cracking noise: like bones rearranging themselves. At this point, Alice gasps in horror, telling her parents about the girl she knocked down: “Her face. It’s…changing.” It’s an eerie, sinister line – all the more so because we can’t actually see any of it with our own eyes.

The big twist comes when Alice’s parents arrive at the scene – deep in the heart of the forest – and come upon her car parked by the side of the thin, overgrown woodland road.

The two prostrate legs (with, horrifyingly, one shoe knocked off in the impact) of the girl are visible near the side of the road; but of Alice, or the older couple she ran into out there, there is no sign. Then, the real kicker of a reveal arrives – the rapidly cooling body is Alice’s.

But if that wasn’t enough, how about a third reveal?

While staring down at the body of their dead daughter, Alice calls them again.

But it’s not Alice – it’s that unnamed woman. She taunts the Finches – giving them a morality lesson about what happens when someone fails to take responsibility for their actions, while telling the Finches of their plans to “correct” their daughter, as well as their unborn grandchild. Reasoning that they can’t be too far behind that spectral voice, the Finches get back into their car and pursue their daughter’s unseen captive deeper and deeper into the forest, plagued constantly by that voice…until they find the path blocked by the police car they’d called earlier.

From there, we cut to morning, with Frank and Maddie sitting disconsolately on the back of the ambulance. A detective stands over Alice’s dead body, mulling over the scene. Deducing that Alice stopped to get high, then was mowed down in a hit and run, he casually dismisses Maddie and Frank’s assertions that they were communicating with their daughter the whole time – claiming they were merely a trauma response to deal with the whole incident.

Do you believe that? Because I’m not sure I do.

Let’s explain the ending of Hallow Road (2025) in more detail below.

Hallow Road (2025) Ending Explained

Before I get going, let me caveat this section with a note that I don’t believe – not with Hallow Road, and rarely with any film that leaves you with an ambiguous ending – that there is one “correct” interpretation of Hallow Road’s ending. There’s only what you believe, what you intuit, when the credits roll. I’ll explain each, then dive into what I took away.

Hallow Road (2025) ending: the 'rational' interpretation

Firstly, there’s the straight-up explanation offered by the detective: that Alice was hit and killed by an anonymous hit ‘n’ runner in the forest and left for dead. Following this interpretation’s logic, the phone call – and, indeed, the vast majority of the events of the film – were a kind of trauma-induced hallucination; a kind of automatic psychological defence system to enable Frank and Maddie to cope with the brutal, sudden death of their daughter.

My big issue with this way of explaining things is, well…how did the Finches know where Alice was? If Alice really had been dead since before she made that first phone call, how did Maddie and Frank know where she’d be? It’s well-established that the forest where Alice is found wasn’t part of her regular route home; she’d usually take the motorway, and only went to the forest to take drugs and escape both Jakob and her family for a while.

So again – how would Frank and Maddie know where she was? Perhaps the only (logical) explanation for this would be that, before dying, Alice sent her parents her live GPS location via WhatsApp. In this version of events, Maddie never received a phone call at all, but she did receive an unexplained message with Alice’s location.

Noting its remote nature – and conscious of the argument that had just unfolded, in addition to the lack of context around the message with the GPS location – Maddie immediately intuited that something was wrong, at which point her mind snapped, serving as the catalyst for the series of phantom calls that followed.

Does that work? I’m not sure it does – mainly because this hallucination (if that’s what it was) wasn’t experienced by Maddie alone, but by her husband too. Cases of this folie a deux are well-documented in urban legend; but I still have a hard time believing that two high-functioning, middle-class people with established careers would – no matter the hardship – spontaneously descend into the exact same hallucination. It makes no sense.

Matthew Rhys as Frank Finch in Hallow Road (2025).

Which leads us to the second interpretation: one that’s both supernatural in nature, and rooted in the lore of the local land where the events of Hallow Road take place.

Hallow Road (2025) ending: the Supernatural interpretation

This explanation is one steeped in folk-horror tradition, and asserts that what Maddie and Frank encountered on the road that night wasn’t merely a trauma-induced hallucination, but rather the manifestation of something older, darker, and native to the land itself.

Ireland’s mythology is riddled with stories of liminal spaces – crossroads, mists, bogs, deep forests – where the veil between this world and the Otherworld thins. Ashfolk forest, though fictional, feels deliberately coded as one of these spaces. This is most obvious in the title: with even the name of the road Alice meets trouble on hinting at sanctity and haunting.

Through these breadcrumbs, fed to us throughout Hallow Road, Anvari implies that this thin, titular strip of tree-surrounded tarmac isn’t just a physical route, but a passageway into somewhere else; somewhere more ethereal. As for the eerie older woman Alice meets out on the road, Irish mythology provides several potential theories as to their true nature.

One plausible reading is that the unnamed woman Alice speaks with is a banshee – not the wailing spectre of cartoons, but the folkloric harbinger of death.

Traditionally, banshees don’t cause death; they announce it. By interrogating Alice, mocking her irresponsibility, and eventually “claiming” her, the voice could be interpreted as guiding her toward her inevitable fate. Notice how the woman insists she will “correct” Alice and her unborn child: this could be taken as a banshee’s lament twisted into moral judgment – a spirit ‘enforcer’ of sorts.

Alternatively, the couple Alice describes – inquisitive at first, then malevolent – line up with centuries of stories about the Aos Sí, the so-called “good people.” In Irish folklore, these beings often appear as ordinary humans, only to reveal themselves as cruel or deceptive. The strange cracking noise, the “changing” face of the girl on the roadside, and the woman’s sudden violence all reinforce this. It’s as though Alice stumbled into a faerie test: one she failed by lying, panicking, and refusing responsibility. Her punishment? Not just death, but erasure – her voice carried forward only as a distorted echo to torment her parents.

A slightly gentler, though no less chilling, interpretation is that the voice is that of a psychopomp – a guide between worlds. (For any Stephen King fans out there, psychopomps are exactly what the sparrows were in his 1989 novel The Dark Half.) In this version, Alice dies early in the film, and what her parents hear on the phone isn’t Alice at all but a supernatural intermediary allowing her parents to “stay connected” until they can face the reality of her death. This would explain why the voice shares Rosamund Pike’s cadence – it’s both familiar and alien, both Maddie and not-Maddie; a bridge between family and fate.

Personally – and this is from someone who entered the film with extremely remedial knowledge of Irish folklore – I took Alice’s plight to be a play on purgatory; painting the spiral and cycle of guilt as a picture of a perpetual loop in which the sufferer is caught.

By refusing, initially, to take responsibility for her actions in running the girl down – demonstrated by her willingness to let Frank take the blame when he offers to – Alice is doomed to the thrall of whatever ancient creatures inhabit the dark forest.

That said, I like the take that the whole situation can also be seen as a kind of trap, set to ‘test’ the morality of the unfortunate soul who falls into it. In this reading – which was the one I espoused to my friend on the escalator leaving the theatre, at which point a fellow moviegoer in front turned around to agree – the girl Alice struck down wasn’t a girl at all, but something antediluvian and inhuman; a shapeshifting faerie or banshee that’s part of a much wider cadre living in the shadows of the trees. This community then watches to see what the driver does – whether they do the right thing and alert the authorities, or whether they attempt to shirk their responsibilities to the law.

If it’s the latter – which in Alice’s case, it of course is – the face of the victim changes to that of the driver. The folkloric creatures then claim the driver, and whisk them away for whatever the “correcting” process entails: perhaps it’s a kind of conversion process that turns the human driver into one of them. I’d also bet that, when the next person comes driving down Hallow Road and into that trap, the face of the girl they end up colliding with will be – you guessed it – Alice’s.

This isn’t just fanciful over-reading. Hallow Road gives us:

• Auditory clues – the bone-cracking, the distorted voices, the way Alice’s speech patterns shift unnervingly.

• Spatial dislocation – the forest roads form a labyrinth where GPS fails and logic breaks down, classic folklore “trap” territory.

• The third-act pursuit – Maddie and Frank chasing an unseen presence into the forest only to be cut off by a police car is pure fairy-tale structure: mortals straying too deep into the woods and being barred from following the dead.

These moments suggest that Anvari wanted the film to function not just as a psychological study of grief, but also as a brush with the uncanny – a reminder that some tragedies feel so unnatural they can only be explained as encounters with forces beyond human comprehension. That’s why, despite the more ‘rational’ interpretations, to me that final morning scene – with the detective casually chalking everything up to trauma – is less an answer than a dismissal. Horror often thrives in what the rational mind refuses to see. And, yes – while you can walk away from Hallow Road believing it was all in Maddie and Frank’s heads – the forest, the voice, and the folkloric dread suggest something more enduring.

They suggest that there are places in the world where responsibility, guilt, and punishment don’t belong to us alone, but to something wider, and in this case more sinister – to powers beyond our control. And powers that, perhaps – especially when driving alone, through a forest, on a dark, cold night – we’d much rather pretend aren’t real.

What did you think of the ending of Hallow Road (2025)? Let me know in the comments!

Oh, and if you're interested in exploring more horror films about grief, this trio – The Woman in the Yard (2025), Bring Her Back (2025), and It Feeds (2025) – all fit the bill!