What’s Real and What’s Not in Never Let Go’s Surreal Ending

If there’s a lesson to be learned from director Alexandre Aja’s fork-tongued horror tale, Never Let Go, it’s that one should never come between a boy and his dog — even if you’re Halle Berry. Outside of that, though? This movie mostly left us with questions.

Never Let Go follows Momma (Berry), her two sons Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV), and their dog, Coda (played by a very good boy named Brass). According to Momma, whose actual name is June, she and her boys are all that’s left of a world that’s been ravaged by evil. Their house is their only refuge, and whenever they leave it to forage for food, they tie ropes around themselves to extend its protective powers like demon-repelling extension cords. After a harsh winter, Sam and Nolan’s faith begins to waver. Is their mother really protecting them, or are her hyperprotective tendencies a sign that she, herself, is broken?

For most of its run time, Never Let Go slinks along slowly, but its final act explodes like a powder keg. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.) 

When June tells the boys that they’ll need to kill the family dog to survive, Nolan refuses to follow orders. Instead, he locks June in the greenhouse and cuts her rope — an attempt to show her that she’s chasing ghosts. Before long, June sees a ghoulish, oozing specter of her mother, who threatens to make June kill her sons. Instead, June slashes her own throat. Sam refuses to forgive Nolan for their mother’s death, and when a hiker shows up at the house, Sam kills him, convinced he’s just another one of “the evil’s” tricks. But then, the hiker’s daughter comes looking for him, sees June’s corpse, and flees from Sam in the night — which prompts Sam to finally let go of his rope and chase after her.

We can all probably guess what happens next. The evil touches Sam, who traps Nolan in the house and burns it to the ground — but not before Nolan locks himself in the family prayer cellar (a coffin-like space under a trapdoor) with a phantom of their mother, who turns into a snake and then disappears after he says “I love you.” By the time we get into the helicopter, we’ve lost all hope of a clear-cut ending. But let’s do our best to make sense of this wild and weird conclusion anyway!

Let’s start from the beginning: Momma definitely killed her husband and parents, right?
Oh, yeah. In the present, the zombified, snake-tongued version of her mother’s mouth is dripping black bile, and she calls June a “baaaAAAd little goat” for “puttin’ poison in my food.” And when the boys’ dad appears to June, he taunts her for not telling them “the truth about their father,” because then she’d have to “tell them who you really are.”

But Samuel and Nolan can’t see any of these creatures?
Right.

Are they, like, manifestations of Momma’s guilty conscience or something?
Like many aspects of this movie, Aja leaves that ambiguous. One could take these apparitions to be some kind of hallucination, given that June’s the only one who sees them and they all speak to her own self-perceived failings. We know that June grew up under an extreme form of Christianity, so this could all be a form of emotional self-flagellation. It also seems like June’s mother probably abused her, based on the scars on her back and Zombie Mom’s threats to hurt June for sitting in her chair. The movie clearly wants us to at least wonder if June was trapped in a repressive domestic situation and killed her oppressors to make it stop.

Then again, there’s also reason to believe that “the evil” is real — mainly because of the Polaroid selfie that Samuel takes of himself toward the end of the movie, which shows a demon’s hand on his shoulder. Given that we, the audience, see the photo through our own eyes (not just Samuel’s perspective), it stands to reason that he really was touched by a malevolent force.

Backing up, then, if “the evil” is real, does that mean that the hiker who came by the house after Momma killed herself was Samuel and Nolan’s hallucination?
Not unless they hallucinated themselves a few cans of Hormel chili.

Because the food Nolan steals from the hiker’s backpack is real, it seems like he can’t just be a figment of the boys’ imagination. Plus, he’s holding an iPhone, which Samuel and Nolan would never have seen before and, therefore, cannot hallucinate.

But when Samuel lets go of the rope, the hiker’s kid turns into a weird, creepy-crawly monster. Was she ever real?
This is where things get complicated.

I think that the girl and her father are both real, and that once a person lets go of the rope, they drop into some sort of alternate dimension where “the evil” has been lurking all along. Those touched by evil continue to exist in the “real” world, but now, the darkness can access and control them, altering their perception.

So, Momma is lying when she says the outside world has crumbled and her family is all that’s left?
I’d say she must be lying, delusional, or just ignorant. If I had to guess, I’d go with “traumatized and therefore closed off from reality.”

But if Samuel really is possessed by the end, that means that the rope tying everyone to the house really was keeping them safe, right?
I guess so! Maybe “the evil” doesn’t extend past the family’s property line? We’d have to contact the local zoning board.

What we know is this: Sam let go of the rope, (probably) got possessed, and then decided to murder his brother and destroy their house, which also happens to be the one refuge from “the evil.”

But again, all of this goes back to the movie being intentionally open-ended; we’re here to do an explainer, but a lot of these questions aren’t meant to have definitive answers.

Right. Like, I thought when Nolan hugged the ghost of Halle Berry under the trapdoor at the end of the movie and she turned into a snake and then disappeared when he said “I love you,” that meant that the evil had been defeated. But then, in the helicopter, Sam said, “I love you more,” which feels like a hint that “the evil” is still within him?
Can you imagine trying to explain this movie to someone who hasn’t seen it? It’s absolutely bonkers when you type it all out. But to answer the question, ?????!?!

I do think that Nolan hugging his mother and telling her that he loves her (even as a snake-monster climbs out of her skin) feels representative of the vindicating power of familial love and forgiveness. When June’s snake self relaxes into Nolan’s arms and then disappears, it feels like a healing moment of closure. But then, yeah, Sam uttering the words that “the evil” made Nolan think he’d said in the beginning feels like confirmation that the darkness is not entirely behind us.

One could make the case that Sam, the more faithful of June’s sons, represents the struggle of unhealed intergenerational trauma: His mother took on her mother’s ascetic fundamentalism, and now he’s inherited it as well. Nolan, meanwhile, would represent the cycle-breaker in the family. But honestly, I think that might be reading a little further into this than anyone intended.