SPOILER ALERT: the following article contains massive spoilers, including the ending. If you have not yet seen the movie, proceed at your own risk, or better, come back to this article later!
Having escaped from a cult as a child, Laura must face her past when its sinister members break into her home. After the group attempts to steal her eight-year-old son, David, the two of them flee town in search of safety. But soon after the failed kidnapping, David becomes extremely ill, suffering from increasingly sporadic psychosis and convulsions. Following her maternal instincts to save him, Laura commits unspeakable acts to keep him alive but soon, she must decide how far she is willing to go to save her son.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Son Video Summary
Son Plot Summary and Synopsis
The movie starts in a roadside diner in 2012. A frightened and exhausted young woman (Andi Matichak) drinks a large cup of coffee. She wears dirty clothes and is barefoot, while is it heavily raining outside.
Two men enter the diner, sit on two separate tables, but are clearly after the girl. The girl gets up and runs out of diner; she is pregnant, about 8-9 months or so. The men run after her.
The young woman drives away when contractions begin. She pulls over and starts screaming that she doesn’t want the baby. A baby boy is born, and a woman embraces him.
Eight years later, Laura (Andi Matichak) and her son David (Luke David Blumm) live in their own house in a friendly neighborhood.
Laura drives David to school and confirms with her neighbor Susan (Erin Bradley Dangar), that she [Susie] will pick up David after school as Laura has a late class tonight.
David asks Laura, what would she do if she has 8 arms, and she answers she wouldn’t hide her extra arms.
Laura is a preschool teacher and teaches her pupils the alphabet. She studies childhood PTSD in her late class.
Laura is back home with David, and he asks not to shut off the night light as he fears zombies, because he played a scary zombie video game just before going to bed. She shuts it off.
Laura is in her room and hears someone’s footsteps. She thinks it is David and asks him to go in. No one responds. She goes out and there is nobody in the corridor.
She goes up and finds out eight people of different ages inside David’s room – they stay around his bed and stare at Laura. The door closes by itself, and Laura begins to scream trying to open it. She runs to Susie and asks her to call the police, while she grabs the knife and goes to David’s room.
There are no strangers inside and David lies across the bed with his pajamas off.
The police detective Paul Tate (Emile Hirsch) takes her fingerprints so that to differentiate them from the other fingerprints in the house and tells Laura that he didn’t find any evidence of anyone breaking into the house. Laura insists she closed all the windows and the doors and double and triple-checked them. She didn’t lose the key, and neither anyone has a spare.
Another detective, Steve (Cranston Johnson), asks if all this could be just Laura’s lucid dream. Laura fiercely denies the allegation, and Paul asks Steve to go back to the police station. He says that he believes Laura’s story and confirms the doctors didn’t find if anything is physically wrong with David.
David is sleeping while Laura checks his body for marks including his mouth. He asks her what is doing. He also doesn’t remember seeing any strangers in his room.
Laura asks him if he took off his pajamas during the sleep, but David cannot confirm this for sure. But he remembers his dream – he was drowning in a river of blood.
Paul meets Laura the next day during her class to inform her that there were not any fingerprints inside the house except for hers, David’s, and their neighbors. She tells him David may have taken his pajamas off in the middle of the night. Paul gives Laura his card and allows her to call him any time. He also asks her to call him Paul.
Laura wakes up in the middle of the night when a male voice asks her to wake up. She sees David covered in blood and wakes up again. David is sleeping nearby.
David tells her that he has a headache and stomachache. Laura promises to take him to the doctor in the morning. Dogs bark outside.
Laura hears a noise outside and goes down to check. She sees a figure by the door and calls Paul. He doesn’t find anything.
David goes down and vomits blood on the floor. He has a seizure at the hospital, but medical examination finds nothing – no illnesses, no drugs, or anything. The doctor has no idea what it is, while David’s condition is worsening by the second – his skin becoming burned out.
The doctor asks Laura to be prepared for the lethal outcome.
Laura has a dream of her sleeping in a king-size bed with some kind of a cursed cross above, David, and a banner with ‘He is coming’ written on it.
David wakes up and talks. The next morning, he is fine and behaves like a normal child with no sign of his previous condition.
Laura starts to go out with Paul, he gets along with David. Laura says that David doesn’t like everyone but likes Paul.
At the Chinese diner, Laura tells Paul she wants to sell the house, but he tells her it is her home, and she should stay. David refuses to eat.
They get to Laura’s house, and she asks Paul to stay, then kisses him. She notices a fresh wound on his right arm.
David screams and has another seizure. The doctor still has no clue about his condition.
Laura tells Paul her story. She was raised in a cult and escaped 8 years ago. She was not initially sure, but now she knows there were cult members in David’s room that night. She asks Paul to stay with them because cult members are capable of morbid things. He agrees.
David is again in his previous condition with burned skin.
Laura has the same dream with new details: naked people marching on her with a dressed-up man as their leader, naked people having a pool party. ‘He is coming’ banner is also present.
Laura wakes up and hears an unknown doctor instructing nurses that the boy is the priority. Two men go out of the car parked in the hospital parking lot and run into the hospital.
Laura takes David and runs away. She takes a taxi to Susan’s house and leaves David for a few minutes while she is taking money, clothes, and a car from her house.
David asks Susan to get closer to him.
Paul calls, Laura asks him not to believe anyone, as everyone can be in a cult.
She goes back to Susan’s, but the door is closed. She sees a dropped lamp on the floor. Laura goes through the backdoor and takes a knife and a hammer on her way. She goes into the room where he left David and finds him eating Susan’s bowels. Laura is terrified and drops the tools. David says he feels better now.
Laura takes David to the shower and gets him to sleep. He doesn’t seem to understand what he has done.
Laura covers dead Susan’s face, writes on the wall ‘He is coming’ with Susan’s blood, and draws the cross from her dreams. Then she takes David and rides away from the town. Paul calls her but she drops the cell out of the car.
Laura and David stay in the motel. The next morning, they are declared missing on the local TV news program. Laura buys a new car so that police don’t track them down. She takes David to a friend of hers, who should be able to help her remember a few things.
Paul and Steve investigate the crime scene in Susan’s house. Steve shows Paul newspaper clippings.
Laura’s real name is Anna Hansen, she is from Kansas and suffered through years of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of her father Phillip Hansen, and other men who paid him to rape her. She was treated for mental trauma in Kansas State Hospital, as her mental state was severely damaged.
Laura comes to Mrs. Naegle. Laura asks David to listen to the music while she speaks to her. Laura is looking for Mrs. Naegle’s son, Jimmy Naegle. Mrs. Naegle is not very happy to see her as she blames her for introducing her son to her father. But eventually, she tells Laura that Jimmy became a drug addict and informs about his whereabouts – Calachmont Square, Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Paul, in turn, looks for Dr. Bradlee who treated Laura.
Laura goes to Jimmy’s place. He looks quite unhealthy both mentally and physically.
Dr. Bradlee tells Paul, that Laura suffered so much that retreated herself into a fantasy world. He confirms that she had an extreme psychotic episode, and says that was no cult or conspiracy, or any fantasies that Laura tries to perpetuate – it was all in her head.
Laura tells Jimmy that she was given medication in the hospital that erased her memory. But Jimmy remembers it all.
The cult members conducted ceremonies, where they killed and tortured animals in front of him and Laura when they were kids. They did this in Laura’s bedroom because she was the only one who could do chanting. Everyone else tried, but she was the only one who could, that is why cult members called her special, Palestine. Her father taught her how to make demon Huntsman rise from hell.
Then Huntsman raped Laura. Her memories about her father and other men are false as the cult members considered her sacred and would never touch her. Jimmy aggressively denies that he was abused too.
David stands up and says that his skin hurts.
Paul heads to Mississippi too.
Laura and David arrive in another motel. An aggressive pimp tries to talk to Laura. David asks Laura to sing to him, and they both fall asleep.
Laura sees her father in her dream, who asks her to say the words.
David has another seizure, this time he insults Laura and aggressively demands to get him some food.
Laura remembers her chanting and summoning Huntsman.
She lures the pimp into the room for David to kill and eat him. After feeding, David tells Laura he loves her and starts watching the cartoons.
Laura puts dismembered pimp into the bag and trashes it when they leave the motel. She also writes ‘He is coming’ text on the wall.
Paul and Steve arrive at Jimmy’s place but find him dead – naked with crosses in his mouth and ‘He is coming’ text carved on his chest.
Laura wakes up in the next motel and David says his dream – he was flying and could see everything from above. Then he raised his hands cracked the world in half – the fire emerged, buildings were burning, people were screaming.
Laura tells David that she won’t be able to help him when he gets ‘sick’ next time. They go to the nearby carnival and ride the carousel.
Paul and Steve find the pimp’s body.
David is ‘sick’ again and Laura takes him into the motel. Three men enter the room after them trying to get David. Laura shoots with pimp’s gun. She kills two of them, and heavily wounds the third one – Steve. He dies in her arms. Laura runs away with David and drives back to her childhood house.
She takes David to her room and starts chanting, but nothing happens. Huntsman appears behind Laura only after she threatens to kill David.
Paul enters the room and Huntsman disappears. He says that Laura made up everything, but she insists the demon is real and the cult members fed David with human flesh to awaken his demonic nature.
Laura tries to kill David, but Paul shoots her dead.
Son Ending
David is in the hospital. Paul enters the hospital ward and tells him that he is here to protect him. Next, he takes off his coat, cuts his right arm, and pours his blood into David’s mouth. He then cuts a chunk of his flesh off the arm and feeds David with it.
Paul says that no one can ever know who David is and that Paul took care of everything. It is revealed that Paul is a member of the cult, and that he killed Jimmy. Paul says that David is never going to be alone again and that Paul has a surprise for him. The surprise is Huntsman, his father.
David calls Huntsman ‘Daddy’.
The Ending Explained
It is obvious that Paul was among the initial group of cult members, and he knew Laura’s story before meeting her in person. It was Paul who fed David his flesh right before David’s miraculous healing in the hospital. Paul’s only task was to protect David at all costs, and he succeeded in his mission.
Cooncel Rating
A mediocre horror movie with an evident plot twist. The only interesting part is its connection with Roman Polanski’s ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ – it also featured satanic cult members and rape by the demon. Additional, but most likely pure unintentional connection is Emile Hirsch’s (Paul) impersonation of Jay Sebring in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ who was an ex-boyfriend of Sharon Tate. She was the wife of Roman Polanski.
Source: © Cooncel.com.