Aahana Swrup
Lee Cronin’s 2019 feature film directorial debut, ‘The Hole In The Ground,’ is a mystery horror film that stars Seána Kerslake, James Quinn Markey, and Kati Outinen, among others. The film revolves around single mother Sarah and her son Chris following a new move into the Irish countryside. After coming across a strange sinkhole, young Christ starts exhibiting strange, uncanny behavior. As his presence around the house grows more menacing by the day, Sarah realizes Chris may not be her actual son at all. Things become even more complicated after Sarah discovers a similar case that happened a few years earlier with town resident Noreen and her dead son James.
If you’re curious to learn more about the suspenseful mystery surrounding the sinkhole and how it changes Sarah and Chris’s lives forever, here is everything you need to know about the ending of ‘The Hole In The Ground.’ SPOILERS AHEAD!
The Hole In The Ground Plot Synopsis
Following a divorce, Sarah O’Neill moves into a new town with her young son, Christopher, looking for a fresh start. While driving to their isolated house near the woods, the two almost get in a car accident when an eerie old woman appears in the middle of the road. Later, at home, Chris picks a fight with Sarah regarding his father’s newfound absence from their lives. The argument blows up, and Chris runs out of the house and into the woods. When Sarah follows after him, she comes across a giant creepy sinkhole. Eventually, Chris finds Sarah, and the two return home after making up.
The next day Sarah urges Chris to sign up for the school talent show and suggests it might help him make new friends. That night Sarah invites over some of her new neighbors for dinner and learns about a local tragedy concerning the old woman she previously encountered. A few years ago, the woman, Noreen Brady, went mad and started accusing her son, James, of being an imposter. James died in a car accident a few months later, and the townsfolk believe Noreen intentionally killed her son.
Later that same night, a loud noise wakes Sarah, and she rushes to check on her son. After failing to find Chris anywhere in the house or the forest, Sarah calls up the police. However, Chris appears shortly after, claiming to have never left the house. As such, the next day, Sarah consults a doctor about her anxiety, and the doctor prescribes her some sedative pills. Afterward, when driving home from school, Sarah and Chris again encounter Noreen. When Sarah approaches her, Noreen cryptically tells Sarah that Chris is not her actual son and tries to attack Chris through the car window.
Disturbed by Noreen’s violent outburst, Sarah stops by Noreen’s house the next day, only to find her headless dead body in the garden. The police take Sarah’s statement, and after finding Noreen’s head buried in the ground, they write the incident off as a suicide. Afterward, Sarah talks with Des and discovers many similarities between her situation and Noreen’s.
Soon after, Sarah goes out for a run in the woods and finds Chris’s favorite toy thrown on the forest floor. Upon her return home, she confronts her son about going into the woods unaccompanied. Chris vehemently declines her claims and, in a fit of rage, pushes the dining table onto Sahrah. The following night, Sarah peeks into Chris’s room and witnesses him chase down a spider and eat it despite his deep-seated arachnophobia.
Sarah’s concerns about her son rapidly grow, and she hides a camera in his room. After Chris’s talent show at his school, Sarah leaves Chris behind and drives back home on her own. She goes through the camera footage and realizes the boy in her house is not Chris. However, when Sarah shows the video to Des, he becomes angry at James’s mention and refuses to believe Sarah. Back home, Chris asks Sarah why she left him alone and asks her never to leave him alone again.
That night, Sarah mixes her pills into Chris’s food for dinner and later asks him to play her favorite game with her. She counts down from three, but Chris stays still instead of making a silly face. As such, Sarah’s suspicions get confirmed, and she confronts Chris about his true identity. Chris gets angry and attacks Sarah. Later he drags her out to the woods and buries her head inside the ground. However, soon after, the pills kick in, and Chis passes out.
The Hole In The Ground Ending: What Is Inside The Sinkhole?
Sarah wakes up in the forest soon after Imposter Chris passes out. She withdraws her head from under the dirt and drags Chris back home to the basement. While Chris is still unconscious, Sarah holds a mirror to his face and sees a monster in his reflection. Shortly after, Chris wakes and attacks Sarah again. However, this time, Sarah overpowers him and leaves him screaming hysterically in her basement.
Sarah walks into the woods to the sinkhole. After making her way inside the hole, Sarah finds a tunnel and crawls through it. The tunnel takes Sarah to an underground clearing with human bones littered around. There, she also finds her son Chris knocked unconscious on the ground. However, Sarah soon realizes she’s not alone in the cave when a number of faceless monstrous creatures attack her. She tries to drag Chris’s limp body back out through the tunnel, but one of the creatures follows behind.
As the creature tries to take hold of Chris’s leg, Sarah watches its faceless body transform into her own doppelganger. The sinkhole is full of these shapeshifting creatures that can duplicate the body of someone from a glance. Years ago, one of them took James’s place among the humans, and now they are doing the same thing with Chris and Sarah. However, Sarah manages to escape from the sinkhole and leaves her doppelganger behind.
What Happens To Sarah and Chris?
After her successful escape, Sarah carries her son to their home. She realizes she has to flee from this town as soon as possible and leaves Chris’s barely lucid body by the car outside. Meanwhile, Sarah runs back into the house to grab her car keys and overhears loud noises coming from the basement. Chris’s doppelganger pleads for Sarah to help him, but Sarah devises a different plan. She sets her house on fire in order to kill the creature and drives away with Chris.
A few months later, Sarah and Chris moved to a different town. Sarah is taking college courses and living in an apartment with her son. However, her experience with the last town’s sinkhole stays with her. Though Sarah lets Chris play around on his own, she also keeps surveillance on him, photographing him from afar. In the photographs, she checks her son’s face to make sure it’s really him instead of another faceless imposter.
Is Chris A Human Or An Imposter?
At the end of the movie, the paranoia Sarah feels easily rubs off on the viewers as well. The photographs Sarah takes of Chris show a clearly ordinary human silhouette instead of the monstrous creature Sarah previously came across. However, the motion from his bicycle obscures his face a little, and viewers are left wondering whether or not Sarah truly saved her son or if she brought another imposter into her new home.
However, regardless of Sarah’s suspicions, at the film’s end, Chris really is her son and not an imposter. Months ago, at Noreen’s funeral, Des tells Sarah that Noreen used to think the mirror showed James’s true identity. As a result, Noreen had filled her house with various mirrors, all of which remained covered by the time Sarah visited Noreen’s house for the funeral.
Likewise, Sarah also decorates her new home in the city with numerous mirrors. At the very end of the film, we see Sarah’s own reflection in one of the giant mirrors. It confirms Sarah’s status as a human since there is nothing out of order with her reflection in the mirror. Similarly, since Sarah is so vigilant about Chris and his identity, she would have noticed if anything was wrong with Chris this time around.
Sarah’s past experience simply leaves her so traumatized she’s constantly cautious about her son’s life. Nevertheless, the creatures-infested sinkhole remains untouched back in the countryside. Though Sarah and Chris have escaped their evil presence, it is likely that the cycle continues long after their departure.
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