Just because Halloween is over doesn’t mean you have to stop watching scary movies. For example, The beast within is now streaming on Hulu after it hit theaters earlier this year, and it’s sure to send shivers down your spine.

Directed by Alexander J. Farrell, with a screenplay by Greer Ellison, The beast within is apparently a werewolf movie, with Game of Thrones actor Kit Harington as a man who sometimes transforms into a wolf-like monster. (Jon Snow loves his wolves!) But, as his on-screen young daughter discovers, the story is a little more complicated than that.

Also starring Ashleigh Cummings, James Cosmo and Caoilinn Springall, The beast within offers a fresh take on the werewolf stories we all know and love. If you feel confused by the ambiguous ending, don’t worry, Decider is here to help. Read on for a breakdown of The beast within plot summary, and The beast within ending explained.

Warning: Major The beast within spoilers ahead.

The beast within plot summary:

A young English girl named Willow (Caoilinn Springall) lives with her parents Noah (Kit Harington) and Imogen (Ashleigh Cummings) and her grandfather Waylon (James Cosmo) in a remote location. She suffers from a severe form of asthma that sometimes requires her to breathe from an oxygen tank. Willow knows something strange is happening with her parents: every month, her mother takes her father into the woods with a pig from their farm. She also sees bruises on her mother’s body, and her father has a bad temper when she and her mother do anything without him.

One night, Willow follows her parents into the woods. She sees her mother put a chain collar around her father and watches him transform into a terrifying monster. Willow panics, has an asthma attack and is taken home by her mother. When Willow recovers, she is initially angry at both of her parents. Her grandfather tries to take Willow away. Willow is ready to leave with Grandpa, but Noah and Imogen stop them.

Dad takes Willow aside and tearfully explains to her that he is hit by a family curse, which forces him to transform into a monster once a month, when the full moon rises. In other words, he’s a werewolf. He cries and explains that he knows he should leave, but he doesn’t want to live without his wife and daughter. Willow accepts this story and hugs her father.

For the next month, things are going well. Then the next full moon comes, and Mom and Dad disappear into the woods again. Willow plays with dolls at home, imagining the scene of her mother chaining her father. She overhears her mother and grandfather arguing: grandfather tells his daughter that one day Noah will kill her and Willow. A panicked Willow has an asthma attack and her oxygen tank runs out of air. Mom is forced to go into the barn during Dad’s transformation to get a spare tank.

Dad attacks Grandpa and hurts him. Mom returns to save Grandpa, and with Willow’s help, the three of them almost escape the house. But Dad chases after them, so Grandpa stays behind to give Willow and Mom more time to escape. Mother and daughter run away into the woods, with Dad in hot pursuit.

The beast within ending explained:

Dad/the werewolf picks up Willow, as if to run away with her. Mom convinces Dad to put Willow down and speaks in a soothing voice, asking her to return to her human form. But it doesn’t work. When it becomes clear that Dad/the Werewolf is about to kill Mom, Willow uses her oxygen tank as a blowtorch to burn her dad alive. After Willow kills her father, she and her mother pack up their lives, leave home, and probably start over.

In the film’s final scene, the film reveals via flashbacks that this whole “werewolf” thing is, in fact, a metaphor for domestic violence. We see that Willow constructed this narrative as a coping mechanism, after witnessing her father – fully human and not a werewolf – brutally beat her mother. What she saw in the barn that night wasn’t supernatural, but it was certainly horrific.

With this new information, we can see previous scenes in the film in a different light, like the scene where Willow used dolls to imagine her father being held. We saw these events from her point of view and she is not a reliable narrator. It was an illusion encouraged by her father, who preferred his daughter to think he was a werewolf rather than a wife beater.

And on this happy note, the film ends. It was all just a metaphor!