After Darkness Ending Explained (2024)

The ending of 2019's After Darkness was either uplifting or harrowing depending on how it's read, and when fully explained, reveals that the story has a surprising amount of thematic depth. In Batán Silva’s sci-fi drama the world is suffering an inexplicable solar catastrophe that is causing the sun to burn out. As light and heat become more scarce, Raymond Beaty (Tim Daly) and his wife Georgina (Kyra Sedgwick) await rescue in their massive country home from Raymond’s senator friend who is supposedly coming to take them to some caves where they’ll have a chance of survival.

Joining Raymond and Georgina are their children Clara (Natalia Dyer), Ray (John Patrick Amedori) and Fred (Roberto Aguire), who has brought his heavily pregnant French girlfriend Margot (Valorie Curry) along. Prior to the solar disaster, the Beaty family were mostly estranged thanks to dad Raymond’s domineering nature and the death of daughter Abbey, who committed suicide by eating poisonous berries that grow on the mansion grounds. At first, the family is hopeful rescue will still arrive, but as the sun goes out and darkness and freezing temperatures descend, old tensions resurface towards the end of the 2019 sci-fi movie, which is amplified by their supplies running out.

What Happens At The End Of After Darkness

The Final Moments Of The 2019 Movie Are Incredibly Ambiguous

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Towards the ending of After Darkness, Raymond finally gets a call from his friend and finds out help isn’t coming after all, but leads his family to believe they’ll be rescued the following day — except for Ray who overhead the call. Margot gives birth to a healthy baby girl, but the family’s strained happiness is short-lived when a pair of marauders break in and force Raymond to admit they aren’t being rescued. Margot leaves with her newborn while the rest of the family discuss their impending death and what heaven is like if it exists.

The Beatys fall asleep together and when they awaken the following morning, it appears as though the sun has miraculously come back as they step outside and bask in its warmth. The question posed by the ending of After Darkness is whether its final scene is real, a dream or the family experiencing some sort of afterlife. Taking certain scenes that came before the ending into consideration it seems the latter is the most likely conclusion.

Throughout the sci-fi drama, snippets of Lord Byron’s 19th century poem "Darkness" appear which was itself inspired by a catastrophic event – the 1815 eruption of volcano Mount Tambora in Indonesia. The film opens with a line from the poem that reads “I had a dream, which was not all a dream,” which seems to dispel the notion the final moments are a dream.

Also, slightly before the closing scenes of After Darkness, son Ray gathers a bunch of the same berries his sister used to commit suicide and gives them to his mother. It’s likely that after realizing help wasn’t coming after all, the family ate the berries and died, meaning the film’s ending is a representation of the Beatys’ afterlife.

The Real Meaning Of The After Darkness Ending

The 2019 Sci-Fi Was Either Uplifting Or Harrowing

The ending of After Darkness was incredibly ambiguous, though it revealed several thematic messages behind the movie — and these differ depending on how it's interpreted. The most uplifting way to explain the ending of After Darkness was that the sun burning out was only temporary. Taken literally, the Beaty family emerge in the final moments to see the sun once again shining in the sky. What's more, they appear to be brought closer together as a family. The meaning behind the ending in this interpretation is pretty clear — disaster and hardship can help heal families who have drifted apart.

However, the ending of After Darkness being literal doesn't seem likely, especially since the sun burning out doesn't seem like a process that would spontaneously reverse. The likelihood is that, in reality, the Beaty family all died after consuming the poisonous berries Abbey had consumed. In this interpretation, the final moments of the movie were either a dream conjured up in one of the family's final moments, or a depiction of the afterlife.

In both cases, the meaning of the ending is that, despite their issues both before the movie and throughout, what each family member wanted was simply a reset to a time when they existed harmoniously together and weren't estranged or at each other's throats. Dying together at the end of After Darkness did, in a strange way, give them that. After the sun burned out, the Beaty family were forced to be closer than they had been for years, and while they'd spent a long time being emotionally distant from one-another, they spent their final — and perhaps most significant — moments on Earth together.