When the Wolf Comes Home

The boy is horrified by what he has done. He blames Jess for forcing him to erase Santos, though Jess can barely process what has happened herself as Santos disappears from her memory. She worries that nothing can be done to protect the world from the boy.

The boy throws a tantrum, accusing Jess of being “bad.” Despite her attempts to calm him down, Jess is seized by intense pain, signaling her transformation into a monster. She desperately apologizes for her actions, causing the boy to stop her transformation. The boy affirms his father’s claim that he is the bad one. He retreats from the cabin, making himself invisible to Jess.

The boy runs through the forest, wishing that he had never existed. This thought causes him to stumble. He feels himself being emptied out in a sensation akin to vomiting. He associates this with the care that comes after being sick, which makes him miss his father. Even if he knows that his father will punish him for everything he has done, he makes himself visible to Calvert again.

Jess searches for a way through the forest, which turns infinite around her. It occurs to Jess that the boy has made the forest inescapable. She tries to stay calm and listen to where he might be. She follows his sobbing and eventually locates him. The boy cries in frustration over his situation. Jess empathizes with him, telling him that life is full of frustration. She reassures him with the promise of hope, believing that there is still time to make things better. She affirms him by telling him that he is so much more than a “bad kid” who hurts people. The boy worries that it will be too hard to overcome his badness. Jess believes that he is capable of overcoming difficult challenges. This regains the boy’s trust.

Just as they are about to return to the cabin, Jess and the boy are stopped by the arrival of the boy’s father, who has already transformed into a giant wolf.

The boy apologizes for letting the creature find them. He is too scared to make them invisible again. Jess carries the boy through the forest, trying to escape the creature. Jess feels like she is too slow to outrun it, so she puts the boy down and makes him believe that he can easily reach the cabin. She also convinces him that she will follow him to the cabin soon after he arrives. The boy runs off in the direction of the lake. Jess runs in the opposite direction, talking loudly as if the boy is still with her.

The creature chases Jess.

Jess tires and finds herself outside an abandoned cabin. The creature catches up to her and throws her at the cabin. Jess gets back up and hides inside, though the cabin’s state of decay provides little shelter for her. She finds supplies in the cabin and realizes that Calvert has been occupying the cabin while monitoring Jess and the boy. She also finds a gun, which she takes to defend herself from the creature.

The creature moves elsewhere, which spurs Jess to search for her cabin. She manages to reach it before the creature does. The boy regretfully informs her that he cannot protect them from the creature. When the creature reaches the cabin, Jess sees that it has sprouted new limbs all over its body. The creature picks Jess up and is about to eat her when Jess realizes that she still has Calvert’s gun. She is so terrified by the sight of a needlelike object inside the creature’s jaws that she fires the gun, freeing herself from the creature’s grasp. The creature’s eye is wounded.

After misdirecting the creature to think that they have returned inside the cabin, Jess and the boy escape to the cabin garage. Jess and the boy are more confident now that they know the creature can be hurt. However, the creature’s attack on the cabin renews the boy’s fear. Jess realizes that she can weaponize the boy’s fear against the creature. She convinces him that the garage is full of sleeping bats. When the creature reaches the garage, Jess provokes the boy’s ability, causing the baseball hats to transform into bats and attack the creature.

The sight of the bats fascinates the boy. The bats wound the creature, overwhelming it with their number. The boy feels pity for the creature as it whimpers in pain. All the while, Jess tells him how powerless his father really is. This diminishes the boy’s fear completely and restores Calvert back to his human form.

The boy and his father look at each other, causing the latter to cry. He regrets being seen this way by his son and backs away, apologizing. The boy tells him that he doesn’t want to be afraid of his father anymore and runs after him.

Jess watches as the boy runs to embrace his father out of love for him. She feels the need to separate them but is too weak to do so. She lets the two have their moment of reconciliation. Calvert’s voice gets louder and louder, overtaking his son’s. He apologizes for failing to protect his son. He then shoots the boy with the gun.

When Calvert reverted to human form, he managed to grab the gun from where Jess had dropped it. After shooting his son in the heart, Calvert discards the weapon. His son looks at him one last time, drawing out a scream from Calvert. Calvert apologizes again to his son, trying to explain that he wanted to protect everyone. He blames himself for everything that has happened. He realizes that he was wrong to raise the boy in fear. He admits aloud that he couldn’t find any other way to stop things from getting worse.

Jess approaches Calvert and the boy. Calvert laments his failure to control his son’s fear, as well as his failure to figure out how to raise him. Standing close to him in human form, Jess sees that Calvert has a tattoo dedicated to his family. The boy looks at Jess before dying.

Calvert asks Jess if his son was too dangerous to live. Jess isn’t sure how to answer him, except to say that the boy lived in constant fear of his father. By killing him, Calvert proved that his son was right to be scared. Jess takes the gun and shoots Calvert.

The police arrive. Jess claims that the boy was a victim of his father’s abuse. She says that she killed Calvert in self-defense, but not before Calvert could kill his son. She is too exhausted to explain what destroyed the cabin.

Jess is approached by two FBI agents, who bring Jess to the hospital to recover from her injuries. The agents later take her in for questioning, hoping to get the truth of what happened. Jess declines to say anything. The agents send her back to Los Angeles, though they promise to follow up with her.

Jess returns home to her apartment, which remains a crime scene after the massacre. She finds the boy’s book and can’t handle seeing an illustration of the Big Bad Wolf when she opens it. She spends the night at the same Radisson that she stayed in with the boy. She tries to build a wall around her emotions, protecting herself from the trauma of her recent experiences. The next day, she consumes multiple bottles of alcohol to fortify her mental wall.

Jess ignores all her emails, except for the one that comes from the urgent-care clinic in Pennsylvania. The email reports that her results are positive. Without understanding what “positive” specifically refers to, she drops her phone and avoids it for the rest of the day. She continues to fortify her mental wall with alcohol.

Early the next morning, Jess wakes from a nightmare to a severe hangover. She tries to relieve it by going to the bathroom. Her mind fills with questions about her lack of responsibility, her fear, and her loneliness. When she returns to bed, she hears Tommy’s voice telling her that all her flaws are in her blood.

Tommy appears to her as a faceless man made of shadows. He assures her that he isn’t part of a dream and answers her every thought because he can hear them. One of the animated villains from Who Framed Roger Rabbit appears on the TV, even though the TV is off. He pushes the TV over, breaking it. Jess hears a scraping noise on the glass and sees Cookie’s mauled corpse floating outside. Cookie is carrying the corpse of the boy with her. The more Tommy talks, the more she realizes that he is speaking with the voice of Inner Jess.

Jess kicks the animated villain away after it crawls out from the TV. The wolf creature appears and tears the cartoon apart. Tommy and Cookie make Jess realize that everything she is seeing was made by her. The boy’s corpse repeats Jess’s assertion that the two of them are alike. When Jess remembers this conversation from their road trip, she realizes that she made the boy believe that they were the same; this belief effectively gave Jess the boy’s powers.

Jess cannot believe that she now has the boy’s powers, so the boy reminds her that she had seen a needle inside the creature’s mouth. The manifestation of Jess’s fear in that moment, as well as her ability to convince the boy that the baseball caps were really bats, proves that she now has the same power that the boy had. The boy insinuates that Jess caused his death by wanting it. The voices call Jess out on her cowardice.

Thinking about her infection, Jess tries to shout against the voices, convincing herself that she is okay. It doesn’t work because she doesn’t believe it. She searches for her phone in the dark to prove her statement to herself. When the voices get too loud, she imagines herself backstage and is instantly transported out of her hotel room.

The room that Jess finds herself in is an amalgamation of stages she has performed on over the years. Each one made her feel comfortable because they promised the potential of the shows to come. The voices of the dead are faint, but Jess still hears one voice, assuring her that monsters are only strong in the dark because they feed off the darkness. The voice belongs to Little Jess. Jess tells her younger self that she shouldn’t have the power. Little Jess answers that it only takes a second to believe she is brave, reminding her of everything she has learned from improv.

Jess internalizes this insight, believing that it is possible to be okay, even if she has the boy’s power. She imagines herself capable of undoing all the bad in the world. She tells herself that it is possible only if she stops believing in fear. She uses the power and feels her infection go away. The world around her is silent. She steps on the stage and feels that she is home.