Year: 2020
Runtime: 104 min
Language: English
Director: Jeff Baena
Sarah is a socially awkward young woman who feels like an outsider, with passions for crafting, horses, and supernatural crime shows. Her social life mainly revolves around conversations with a colleague at the hobby shop where she works. Her life takes a strange turn when she begins to suspect that her vivid, lucid dreams are blurring the lines with reality. She finds herself questioning what is real and struggling to navigate her increasingly bizarre experiences.
Warning: spoilers below!
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Still thinking about how Horse Girl (2020) ended? Here’s a full breakdown of the ending, key final moments, major twists, and the deeper meaning behind the film’s conclusion.
The ending of Horse Girl is highly ambiguous and thought-provoking, blurring the lines between reality, memory, and sci-fi elements like time travel and alien abduction. Throughout the film, Sarah’s experiences suggest she might be caught in a looping cycle caused by alien abductions that also involve confusing her sense of time and identity. In her final scenes, she appears to have traveled back in time, or perhaps been placed in a different point in her life by the aliens. This is evidenced when she returns to her childhood home and transforms herself to resemble her grandmother, Helen, implying that she might actually be her grandmother reincarnated or trapped in a time loop.
After making herself look like Helen, Sarah takes Willow the horse into the woods and lies down as lights from the sky illuminate the scene. In the final moments, she’s lifted into the sky, suggesting she’s being abducted again by the aliens, possibly to continue her journey in another dimension or time. The film hints that these abductions aren’t always happening at the same time in Sarah’s life—they seem to send her back to earlier points, creating a loop where she keeps reliving and rewinding her experiences. This is supported by the fact that Sarah emerges days earlier than expected during her mental hospital stay, indicating she’s been looped through time by the aliens.
The nature of Sarah’s reality remains uncertain, partly due to her unreliable perspective—she often confuses her hallucinations with real events. While some parts of her story could be imagined or her mind’s distortion, others suggest her experiences were real encounters with extraterrestrial beings. The recurring motif of her looking identical to her grandmother, combined with her belief that she’s her grandma and her final act of returning to her childhood home, strengthens the idea that she is caught in a bizarre time loop. Ultimately, the ending leaves us questioning whether Sarah has been living a series of delusions, or if she has truly been cycling through different points in her memory and history, manipulated by alien forces. It’s a haunting finale that invites viewers to ponder the mysterious nature of perception, identity, and the possibility of otherworldly influence on her consciousness.
Last Updated: June 25, 2025 at 08:58
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