Rosamund Pike-starrer Hallow Road is a harrowing film about guilt and parenting in a well-done horror film that keeps the suspense intense throughout. The film definitely has you asking lots of questions throughout the course of it, but it soon unravels like the winding roads our protagonists face and gives us the answers we’re all looking for. The film is a testament to the fears of being a parent and losing “control” over your child’s decisions. It’s definitely painful to watch once you start to figure out what’s going on, despite having been shot in a single car for the most part. I must admit, the pace of the car while Frank is driving is quite infuriating because it almost feels like it’s way too slow considering how desperate they are to get to their daughter. But before I put all my thoughts into one big, confusing essay, let’s break down Hallow Road’s ending.
Spoiler Alert
What Does Hallow Road Signify?
The film opens with Maddie hearing an alarm, indicating that something has gone wrong, but there’s no fire, so she simply changes the batteries and moves on. I suppose this is the first sign that the couple don’t realize that something devastating has happened, and they’re simply going to try and fix it. This is a recurring theme in the film because Frank is a controlling father who wants to make sure he protects his daughter in whatever way possible. Even if that means teaching her the wrong thing and telling her to pretend she didn’t kill somebody. On the other hand, Maddie is the kind of mother who keeps secrets. She doesn’t tell her family that she’s quit work, and on the other hand, she doesn’t reveal to her husband that her daughter once took drugs and called her because of a panic attack. I think this gives us a well-rounded idea of what the family is like and how they’re finding it difficult to understand each other for the time being.
I think Hallow Road specifically is a terrifying, dark road (that also goes through a forest) which feels treacherous and never-ending. It’s like a maze, and to me, it represents the difficult journey of parenting, especially when your child needs you and you can’t get to them. In this case, Alice has just told her parents that she’s pregnant, and they clearly didn’t approve of this situation. This led her to run away from them because they didn’t handle it well and couldn’t keep her safe. If they had reacted differently, Alice wouldn’t have been so far away from them, nor would she have done drugs, ultimately ending up in a terrifying place all by herself. The road itself is a representation of the guilt and the fear that are never-ending as a parent.
Additionally, Maddie repeatedly wonders why someone would go to Ashfolk in the middle of the night. As she’s going through the road, she is slowly trying to connect the dots. I think there can be two answers to this: either that Alice just wanted to do drugs and be away from family, or that she felt suicidal because of the situation she was currently in. Not only was she lost mentally, but she also wanted to be lost physically or lose herself to drugs and a feeling of numbness. Ultimately, this resulted in the worst outcome possible.
Who Is The Woman With Alice?
At the beginning of the film, we see the drug Citalopram, an antidepressant, in Maddie’s bag. Maddie is a paramedic who has recently quit her job (and kept it a secret) because she was traumatized after having accidentally mistaken a pulmonary embolism for a panic attack. Maddie feels guilty that she didn’t quit in time and this is further emphasized when Alice performs CPR on the girl she’s “hit.” It’s like Maddie’s replaying the scene of her blunder through Alice because it’s the only way she can get closure. It also allows her to then tell her husband and Alice about her quitting her job. This is likely why she’s taking the medication in the first place. But having done so, she’s now hallucinating. My assumption is that Alice did make a call to her family before she ended up unconscious, which is how they knew where to go, or alternatively, the whole thing is a dream sequence in Maddie’s head, since they entered the car to get to Alice. The combination of her wanting to save her daughter because of her profession, her inability to protect Alice, and the nature of her controlling husband all contribute to the turmoil in Maddie’s mind.
If you pay extra attention to the film, then you already know that the voice of the other woman who finds Alice is Rosamund Pike’s voice. So basically, the film is telling us that the person who took her child away from her is Maddie herself. I think if we had heard a male voice as well, it would’ve become too obvious, but this applies to both parents. They’re the people who (literally) drove Alice to her doom. Of course, the reason they brought in the supernatural element was to make us feel like we don’t know where the movie is going, possibly feeling the same way as Maddie and Frank, and make us wonder if we have the right answers. There’s no ritual, and there are no pagan gods or anything here; it’s all a family matter, and I suppose you could associate this with denial, because they’re creating their own stories to ultimately get over their daughter’s death. Technically, there is no woman with Alice; it’s Maddie herself.
Who Is The Dead Girl?
In Hallow Road’s ending, the big reveal is that the dead girl is actually Alice and not some other girl she hit. Throughout the film, the person that Maddie is trying to keep alive is her daughter. It’s possible that if they had called the authorities on time, things might’ve turned out differently, but instead, Frank tried to take the blame for what happened in order to protect Alice. Sometimes, when parents try to interfere, thinking they know best, they make the situation worse. Children do need guidance for sure, but when your kid is 18 and an adult, you must allow them to make their own decisions and choose their path themselves.
Maddie then asks Alice what she’ll choose to do after hearing this story. Alice says she will do the right thing and wants to apologize to the girl if she’s alive. This is all they needed to do back when Alice told them she was pregnant. The other recurring theme of the film is that of parenting and hypocrisy. Alice was born to her parents when they were young, so they’re projecting their own feelings onto their daughter. They know it will be difficult for her to raise a family, and they want what’s best for her, and currently, that means studying and going to college rather than “starting a family with a Pole.” I know he’s Czech. But this is something that would take ages to understand, especially in Alice’s panicked state. They should’ve let her tell Jacob about her situation, because it may have helped her realize the same thing they’ve been trying to tell her. Alternatively, it might’ve pushed her to start a family, but they’d have to be supportive because it’s ultimately her decision. In the end, the parents still believe that they were talking to their daughter the whole time she was meant to be dead. The thing I’m wondering is, how did they know where to find Alice? It is revealed earlier in the film that she used to go there in the middle of the night with her friends, and that’s where she met her boyfriend. This could be something that was in Maddie’s mind way back, and when she noticed her daughter wasn’t home at 2 AM, she must’ve realized that’s where she’d be. Maddie and Frank are overcome with grief, so they can’t help but be in denial that their daughter died because she was high and ran onto the road after crashing her car in the ditch. What we assume Alice did to another girl was what actually happened to her. There’s a scene in the film where Maddie says she feels bad for the girl’s parents. Maybe this is a little hint to herself that she’s the one who needs to deal with her sorrow.
Hallow Road’s ending revealed that Alice died in a hit-and-run, just as she described with the girl that she apparently hit. Alice ran the car into a ditch, likely because she was high on drugs. While coming out of the car, she might have made the first call to her mother, and while talking to her mother, she stepped into the middle of the road, where someone ran over her. The driver tossed her body in the ditch and left her there to die, without calling the authorities. But why did the mother, or the parents, start imagining things? The thing is, Alice left the house in the middle of the night because she wanted to get away from her parents, who didn’t try to understand her and berated her for something that was an accident. This guilt, combined with their grief, is what pushes them to create stories about what happened and hallucinate the voice of “another” woman. Ultimately, they will blame themselves their whole lives, and like Frank says earlier, they let her ruin her whole future, not because she would’ve gone to jail, but because they trapped her in a powerless feeling.
What If Maddie Wasn’t Hallucinating?
If we look through a supernatural lens, Hallow Road can be interpreted as Alice’s last conversation with her parents. The woman Alice is talking to could be the Grim Reaper, giving her one last chance to confront her parents before she’s gone for good. She could also be a Valkyrie, come to take Alice away from this battlefield of sorrows. Alternatively, there could actually be some witchcraft going on here, and Alice has actually been kidnapped, which would mean the dead girl isn’t her. The woman’s voice talks about Alice not being the first or last, which could imply that there is a system in which these girls get periodically kidnapped and used in rituals. So the girl whose “face changed” to Alice’s could have been one of the previous ones, and Alice will end up in a similar accident later on.
