In the Tall Grass

In the final moments of In the Tall Grass, Becky manages to escape Ross Humboldt by stabbing him in the eye, but she is overwhelmed by the figures in the tall grass that have been guiding her. They carry her to the Black Rock of the Redeemer, where she suffers a miscarriage in front of it. When she wakes, she finds Cal crouching over her, holding a bundle containing her dead fetus. The most disturbing scene follows: Becky loses consciousness again and awakens to find Cal feeding her something. She asks what she’s eating, and he nonchalantly replies, “Grass. Just grass.” Suddenly, she realizes that the food tastes like her own baby, revealing that Cal has been feeding her pieces of her miscarried child—an act of horrific consumption.

As Becky weakens, Travis and Tobin arrive at the clearing, only to be attacked—Travis stabs Ross with a broken bone, and Becky removes Ross’s remaining eye with her necklace in a desperate act of self-defense. Travis then kills Ross by strangulation with a bunch of grass but succumbs to his stab wound afterward. With his dying breath, Travis touches the black rock to understand how to escape the grass, and he is transported back, allowing Tobin to return to the church town safely. Meanwhile, Becky and Cal leave, while in the grass, Travis’s body is swallowed again, emphasizing the cyclical, torturous nature of the dimension.

The ending hints at a complex time loop. Tobin, who emerges from the church, appears to have traveled back in time before Becky and Cal entered the grass, warning them not to go in and showing them a bloody necklace—the same one Travis gave Toby—indicating they are caught in an endless cycle. The grass manipulates space and time, keeping the characters trapped in repetitions of death, where only touching the black rock offers an escape—though doing so leads to their complete assimilation into the grass itself. The film’s conclusion leaves viewers with an unsettling realization: some characters, like Ross and Natalie, remain irredeemably lost in the cycle, trapped forever within the grass, while Tobin’s fate is ambiguous but suggests he may have escaped, or at least, temporarily break free. Overall, the ending is a tragic and disturbing meditation on evil, choice, and the inescapable pull of primal forces that consume everything.

Last Updated: June 25, 2025 at 08:58