Well, look it here. Another movie where you’d better put on your thinking caps because, hey, you’re going to be forced to deduce just what the hell is going on when the credits start rolling. But at the very least, it stars Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys. I sort of liked Hallow Road because it was one of those movies where I was forced to guess which way the story would swing. Obviously, a terrible event would eventually turn even more terrible and sinister, but how? Well, I can say that I was wrong on pretty much all my guesses. Hallow Road wasn’t exactly “wild,” where it blew my mind, but it was nonetheless a quick venture into something that I can enjoy from time to time in a movie where the ending isn’t exactly 100% written out for you. Be warned that although this movie is only an hour and twenty minutes long, it still requires a lot of patience from the viewers. This, more than anything else, was not something I expected at all from this movie.

So let’s get to the meat of it. Maddie and Frank aren’t exactly doing too well in their relationship, and their daughter has bolted with Frank’s car in the middle of the night. They call her up to ask her whereabouts, only to find out that she’s been involved in an accident of hitting a girl who appeared out of nowhere in the forest while she was driving. The parents race to her location, and from there, all hell begins. IMDb’s trivia states that Hallow Road was filmed in only 17 days, which is not hard to believe at all. I’d have to say that maybe 90% of the movie is shot while Maddie and Frank are in their car driving to Alice’s location in the woods.

OK so, the ending. That’s going to be the main talking point of the movie. Just what the heck happened to Alice while Maddie and Frank was in the car? Was she actually abducted by some witch/fairy that haunts the woods and that Alice’s body had been swapped by a changling or was Alice already dead and both parents have triggered some weird coping mechanism in their minds to help deal with that reality? My take is that the latter happened. There’s more evidence throughout the movie to suggest this outcome than the former. It is this alone on why I believe the movie could have been much more weirder (in a good way). If the story showed more convincing scenes or hints of some fantasy and mythical creature causing harm to Alice, then maybe it would have made it harder to choose. Of course, I don’t know what I don’t know so maybe there were these evidences that I just missed.

Prior to going to Reddit to find someone that can best explain their theory, I thought it was important to discover for myself evidence to suggest that the parents were just coping. First, the smoke detector alarm going off in the beginning and waking Maddie up. Even though Maddie changed out the batteries, it kept going. I take this to mean that something significant is about to happen to the characters in the movie. Either they wake up from some sort of weird hallucination in their mind or, in this case, the start of a false and conjured reality. Second, the car turn signal oddly being reflected in front of both parents was an obvious sign to me that something was not right. Third, when the GPS alerted them that they missed a left turn and Frank insisted that he knew the way, the GPS itself still showed their car heading in the correct direction towards their destination a bit later on. Initially, it showed them going the wrong way but I thought I saw it then later corrected itself. It was mentioned that there was only one way in or out of the forest path, so if the GPS was truly correct in that they should have made the left turn, then it shouldn’t have shown that their car was still going in the “correct” direction later. Fourth, and the most obvious tell, is the last scene where it showed Frank smoking a cigarette in the ambulance instead of Maddie. Earlier, it was Frank getting upset that Maddie was smoking in the car, obviously because he likely doesn’t smoke himself. That last scene was evident that the situation was somehow weird, twisted, or reversed because throughout the entire movie, the story was shown through both Maddie and Frank’s point of view. In the ending scene, the view and likely reality itself shifted to that of the detectives, of which we have to take at that point as 100% true because of how traumatized both parents appeared in the ambulance. In addition, none of the parents spoke a word during this scene. Lastly, the movie poster of Hallow Road itself is a tell. The letter A is “upside down” and the letter D is “blurry”. Yeah, I know, stupid, but hey, I also hate it when they do that kind of stuff.

The one major weird thing I can’t explain is just how it could be that both parents were experiencing the same conjured coping mechanisms at the same time. That seems a bit unlikely, but I couldn’t explain it. I believe it was mentioned that Maddie was on drugs, but nothing on Frank’s part. Even if both were on drugs, it would still be highly unlikely that they both experienced the same freaky conjured fake reality together in real time. But in order for my brain to stop processing this movie any longer, I took whichever side provided the most evidence of one being more true than the other and took that as the winner.

Reddit user u/waddupAlien had a good theory. The last point about the parents being familiar with the camp in the forest hints at them using it as a story/excuse for them thinking about the folklore of the witches and fairies in the forest.