someone please explain the ending ---

I think you got it down ok. There was no real monster. Demons were symbolic of the trauma he endured watching his sister get shot and not getting the closure of her killer being punished. I agree that the plot was a bit jumbled, but the ideas and elements taken by themselves were pretty good. Just didn't quite come together at the end.

I saw that knife blooper too. Just bad editing, they could have cut it differently. Doubt it would be reshot if the film was already in the can.

Good acting by all the leads. Nice brother/sister twisty theme. Great father son conflict and the bad guy was very creepy. If the narrative could have been a little stronger piecing it all together it would have been a better movie. I think the style and acting are what is driving all the good reviews from critics who know how hard that stuff is to come by in a horror movie.

Here's what i thought:

-Brother / sister secret - good but spent too much time with the sister, overdone really
-Father / son conflict - great
-Kids a cutter - not done well. Contrived too with the counting scars. Meh.
-Bad guy - took too long to explain and never really revealed motivation
-Demons - scary but didn't quite connect fully with the plot.
-Atmosphere - woods and dark rainy shots well done but the sequences in the cabin seemed too stagey. The car scenes were great.
Lance H - best movie in a LONG time. Glad to see him on his game


Doesn't deserve the low-low rating it got but maybe this director will hit it out of the park on his next go around.

Maddis

Only saw it once, but I saw it differently-

The knife is at first in his right hand, clean. We pan to his face, he reaches over and cuts his left arm (cutting out of shot, but there's a 'schlikk' sound), he puts the knife in his left hand, then we pan back down to the arm (blood starts to flow from arm, knife now bloody) as he now cuts right arm with left.

Worked OK for me. There was a boom in shot though, around the scene where the father falls.

Decent enough, 6/10.

___________________________________
"Did you see what Gaahd just did to us, man?"

See how this works for you Dahauk:

The film cuts back & forth in time, showing the son having problems with hallucinations.

Move close to the final scenes - Iris comes to October & tells him "you see what you want to see".

The Burned Man (for want of a better term) is evil, October is seeing evil intertwined with images of what he was forced to see when the "incident" ocurred.

The perpetrator is evil and becomes the Burned Man.

In the dash for the Mustang, after Iris tells October he can see what he wants, he finally sees the face of the evil entity, which reveals as no longer the Burned Man, and he stabs it with the knife.

On the road out, Iris appears to October, as a child, handing him the daffodil. The last time they were truly innocent and happy.

Was he really driving away in physicality, imagining Iris, or was he actually with her in spirit and really driving away ?

The father chose to see the evil because October saw it, and he was present at the "incident". After October understood he could see what he wanted, we are left not knowing the difference, between thought and reality.

We never really knew whether what he was seeing during the entire film was a hallucination or reality, and that's the way it closes.

You see what you want to see.

If you want to see him make it out, that's what you see. If you want to see him go back to the beginning with Iris, then that's what you see too.

It's all in the mind....