Never Let Go ending explained | Is the Evil real?

The film sees her star as a woman credited only as Momma, who must protect her young twin sons from an unspeakably evil force that has seemingly taken over the world, insisting that they stay securely tethered to each other at all times when leaving their home. She has already had to kill several family members after they were touched by the force, which she refers to simply as the Evil.

Only, things take a turn when one of the boys begins to doubt that the threat is legitimate and goes out on his own – leading to a hectic fight for survival.

Berry has already outlined plans for the film to be the start of a new horror franchise, explaining in a recent interview with ComicBook.com that stories had already been "figured out " for a prequel and multiples sequels.

So where do things at the end of the first film? Read on for everything you need to know about the ambiguous, open-ended conclusion to Never Let Go, with the warning that there are obviously some major spoilers from here on out.

Never Let Go ending explained: Is the Evil real?

Things begin to take a turn when Nolan, one of Momma's two sons, begins to think the threat only exists inside his mother's head. These doubts are fuelled when Samuel breaks his ankle and briefly become untethered but appears to avoid coming into contact with the Evil.

An extremely bleak and brutal winter sees the situation worsen. With the family unable to step outside to gather food, Momma – whose visions have been getting increasingly more vivid and intense – insists that their only means of survival is to shoot and kill the family dog.

Devastated at this prospect, Nolan takes it upon himself to cut Momma's rope and keep her trapped inside a greenhouse, hoping that doing so will allow her to see that the Evil is not real. But the plan backfires: Momma appears to come face to face with the Evil (who takes the shape of her own mother) and then dies by suicide.

Samuel and Nolan are now forced to fend for themselves and a fierce divide grows between them, with the former blaming the latter for their mother's death and behaving in an increasingly erratic manner, all while they continue to starve. Nolan, therefore, takes some extra rope and travels further into the woods than usual, eventually coming across a hiker who seems concerned about how he has been living.

Before the hiker can intervene too much, however, Samuel arrives on the scene and shoots him with a crossbow, with the hiker dying just as he's making an emergency call. That night, a young girl arrives and says that she is the hiker's daughter. But later, after an exchange with Samuel she reveals – in a rather emphatic fashion – that she is actually Evil herself.

After coming into contact with her, Samuel appears to be possessed in much the same way as his mother was before, trying to kill Nolan, setting the house on fire and taking a selfie with a polaroid camera. Meanwhile, within this melee, Evil appears to Nolan in the form of Momma and later reveals itself to be a snake-like creature that disappears when Nolan hugs it.

As the fire Samuel had ignited burns down the house, paramedics arrive and Nolan is helicoptered to safety, learning that Samuel too has been rescued. They eventually reach civilisation and it becomes apparent that the stories Momma had been telling Nolan and Samuel had been fiction: the rest of the word is still functioning as normal.

But there's another twist: at the very end, Samuel whispers to Nolan that "she loves me more" and reveals the polaroid from earlier that appears to show him being touched by a mysterious hand, presumably Evil.

Quite what this all means is fairly ambiguous and open to interpretation – indeed Berry herself has revealed that it is very much up to each individual viewer to provide an explanation that best suits them.

"If these are visions she's seeing because she's schizophrenic or suffers some mental illness, we don't know at that point. But whatever it is, it's real for her," Berry explained in an interview with USA Today.

She added: "Depending on who you are, what you need the ending to be, what you believe about the world and yourself in it, what your spiritual or religious beliefs are, all of that informs how each person sees the ending.

"The beauty of it is that it's open-ended and we can all take away from it what we think the truth of the matter is, because that's true to life. We all see things differently. We all have different opinions. I love that about it."

One way of interpreting the ending is by looking at the two ways in which Samuel and Nolan react to the Evil. Whereas Samuel lets it rule over him, Nolan takes a different approach and is seemingly able to defeat it. Perhaps that is the message of the film: Evil is there whether we like it or not, but it is in our power how we choose to respond to it.

Never Let Go is now showing in UK cinemas.

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