‘Horse Girl’ on Netflix: Director Jeff Baena Explains That Ambiguous Ending

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Horse Girl on Netflix.

After you finish watching Horse Girl, you might have a few questions. Or maybe you’ll want to immediately watch the movie again. The new Alison Brie film, which released on Netflix today after premiering on Sundance Film Festival last month, is the kind of movie that will keep you glued to the screen to the very end, and then have you frantically scrolling through Reddit threads to figure out what the heck just happened. It’s also the kind of movie that prompts “Horse Girl ending explained” articles, but Decider did you one better: We asked writer/director Jeff Baena himself about the ending. But first, some background.

The title of Horse Girl suggests a quirky indie film about a quiet girl who loves horses, and for the first 20 minutes or so, that’s true. Brie, who also co-wrote the script with Baena, stars as Sarah, a young woman who is more or less content with her simple, lonely life. She may not have any friends to take her out on her birthday, but she chats with her kind, maternal coworker at the craft store (Molly Shannon), and finds solace in the company of fictional characters via Purgatory, the Supernatural-esque procedural she’s obsessed with.

This fragile peace comes crashing down when Sarah starts having vivid dreams about being in a sterile white room with people she’s never met. She sleepwalks, wakes up with mysterious scratches on her body, and starts seeing the people from her dreams around town. Definitely alien abductions, right? Not so fast. We learn that Sarah’s family has a history of mental illness. Her grandmother was schizophrenic, and her mother suffered from severe depression that eventually led to suicide. Sarah is scared, as anyone having these frightening dreams would be, but her behavior grows erratic and dangerous at a rate we just don’t associate with mentally stable people.

The question hangs over the entire film: Is it all in her head? Or are the aliens real? After all, sometimes movies have aliens! The ending doesn’t come out and answer this question head-on, and, Baena told Decider in a recent phone interview, that’s exactly the point.

“I’ve never really had an opportunity to do something like this,” said Baena, who also wrote and directed Life After Beth, Joshy, and The Little Hours. “I feel like most of my movies are, for the most part, pretty straight-forward. But this movie, in particular, is a puzzle.”

Let’s break that puzzle down.

How does Horse Girl end?

After Sarah as a public breakdown in the craft store, she is sent to a psychiatric hospital, where her doctor (Jay Duplass) tells her, gently, that while he doesn’t believe she’s being abducted, he does believe he can help her manage her mental illness. A diagnosis is not given, but schizophrenia is implied.

That night in the hospital, Sarah has her weirdest dream yet. Or is it a dream? It’s not clear. Surely some of it is fantasy—like the part where she has sex with the dude (John Reynolds) she treated to a nightmare first date—but we also get the feeling like maybe some of it is real. When she wakes up, she sees that her roommate (Dylan Gelula, from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) in the hospital is one of the girls from her dreams. When that girl tells her she went to bed in 1995 and woke up in the future, Sarah is convinced this corroborates her story: that she is a clone of her grandmother who was abducted by aliens.

After she is discharged from the hospital, Sarah puts on her grandmother’s old dress, collects the horse that once used to be hers, and lies down in the woods. We see a UFO in the sky, her body rises into the air, and she is, so it seems, abducted. And then the movie ends.

What does the Horse Girl ending mean? Were the aliens in Horse Girl real?

The simple answer is: That’s up to you! That said, director Jeff Baena said that while he wanted multiple interpretations to be plausible, he and Brie did have a clear interpretation in mind. And the clues for that interpretation are in there.

“I feel like there are enough clues sprinkled throughout the movie, in my mind, to justify ultimately what we were going for, which was clear,” Baena said. “The intention wasn’t to create something that was ambiguous without an actual explanation, but it was to have enough plausible deniability and a bunch of different interpretations so that people can feel satisfied in whatever their interpretation is. Alison and I have a very clear, distinct idea of what is happening. And I think it’s in there. If, for instance, someone who did not have a history of mental illness had some of the events that were happening in Sarah’s life to them, there is the possibility that they would also be considered to be suffering from some degree of mental illness.”

So… it’s all in her head, right?

“I’m definitely not saying that,” Baena replied. “What I’m saying is that there are enough clues throughout the movie sprinkled, that you can determine one way or the other. And they’re both valid.”

Baena added that he and Brie structured the film so that viewers could interpret Sarah’s abductions as literal or delusions (or anything in between) to highlight the way mentally ill people are treated when they claim strange occurrences are happening to them. Both Baena and Brie have dealt with mental illness in their families, and Brie based parts of the story on her grandmother with paranoid schizophrenia.

“Sarah is an unreliable narrator,” Baena said, “so the film itself is reflecting it. The overall logic of the movie is inherently tied to her mental state. Certain things that most people would not consider as a possibility—so, for instance, time loops, time travel, alien abductions—normally would be dismissed. Here, they are no longer dismissed and are considered just as valid as normal points of view.”

This theme can be summed up in the most heartbreaking line of the film when Sarah tells her doctor, “I know it sounds really crazy, but it just feels really real to me, okay?”

Baena wrote that line, he said, because “it was important for me to communicate, ultimately, that whoever is dealing with mental health issues, it’s not something that they’re doing to themselves. It’s something that’s happening to them. And they’re experiencing things just as real as we’re experiencing things. The main thrust of this movie is to take people that have these conditions and consider them just as equal to everyone else. Their point of view is just as valid and everything that’s occurring to them is just as real. That, ultimately, is the core of the movie.”

No matter how you interpret it, Baena sees the Horse Girl ending as bittersweet.

“If she is her grandma, and she’s going back in time to be her grandma in the ’50s or something, even though that would justify her ideas of what’s happening to her, that’s also is like sort of a cyclical, nightmarish loop that isn’t positive,” Baena said. “If she’s purely delusional, and none of that is happening, it’s sad, in the sense that it’s only going to get worse from this point on. She’s now fully succumbed to her visions. There are all types of interpretations that could happen, but I think, ultimately, the positive interpretations can provide the tragic nature of it.”

Watch Horse Girl on Netflix