'The Rooster' Ending Explained & Movie Recap: What Happened To The Hermit?

I believe we, as humans, rely on the people, pets, or things around us to give our lives meaning. We can’t just go through life completely alone—we need connections. But when we lose what we’re living for, it leaves us wondering: what’s the point now? Processing that kind of grief is incredibly hard. If you have experienced loss yourself or have seen movies such as Manchester by the Sea or Little Miss Sunshine, you know all about the aching loneliness that comes with grief.  The movie The Rooster, directed by Mark Leonard Winter, dives right into this theme of loss and isolation. 

The Rooster follows a police officer named Dan, who is forced to take a break from his job after the death of his best friend and his beloved rooster. Dan, really overwhelmed with grief, doesn’t know how to cope and decides to leave everything behind to spend time in the wilderness. While wandering through the jungle, Dan meets a hermit named Mit. Their relationship slowly develops, and the story explores how two lonely souls, both disconnected from the world, begin to find a new sense of purpose in each other.

Spoilers Ahead

Why did Dan end up in the forest? 

When we first met Dan, it was already clear that he was a lonely man. He went about his day to do  his job as a cop. Dan’s job wasn’t an easy one, because there was a lot of emotional weight he had to deal with. As The Rooster started, we saw Dan come across a man hanging from a tree on the road, and he simply didn’t know what to do with it. Even as a cop, he still felt anxious and nervous seeing incidents like that. There was a woman with a rooster who always appeared in his dreams, in his imagination. Maybe she was his wife who had left him, maybe someone close to him, or maybe just a woman he had accidentally killed in some tragic accident. Who knows? But he clearly hadn’t overcome the loss yet. He felt isolated because he had nobody to talk to. He lived alone with his roosters at home, and the big white rooster was probably his favorite, maybe even a gift from the woman he kept seeing in his dreams.

As the story progressed, we learned about Dan’s best friend, Steve. Steve was another depressed soul, pale, drunk, and wandering around mentally unstable. Actually he suffered a brain injury when he hit his head once, and since then he has been a completely different person. He didn’t know how to handle things properly, like the time he walked naked into a field full of young schoolgirls. Dan, being his best friend and a cop, had to handle the situation for Steve. But Dan didn’t seem to mind—he actually liked taking care of him, liked having someone to look out for. When Dan found Steve passed out in his rooster den, he didn’t judge him. He just put a blanket around him and made him feel like he wasn’t alone. But all that care and comfort didn’t stop Steve from committing suicide. Dan didn’t expect it at all. Someone had dug a shallow grave for him before he killed himself. Later on, we saw how Dan visualized Steve leading him deep into the forest and handing him a gun, almost tempting him to kill himself too. Dan even went so far as to pull the trigger, only to realize it was all in his head. The fact that he felt he deserved to die for not being there for his friend showed how much pain he was in. And if losing Steve wasn’t enough, his favorite white rooster was found dead in its cage, eaten by a fox. The pain Dan felt was unimaginable. He was completely isolated, lonely, and depressed. His chief even told him to hand over his gun and take some time off to process all the loss, because he just couldn’t handle it anymore. His hectic job wouldn’t wait for him, so he had to get himself together to keep going. That’s why Dan decided to take some time off and wander around in the forest to try to make sense of it all.

How did Mit and Dan’s relationship form? 

Maybe when Dan went into the forest, he didn’t have much to think about, or maybe he needed answers for what happened to Steve since he wasn’t there to stop it. He just felt sure that someone in the forest might have seen something. And then, he saw it—a hermit, who was living in a cabin he had built for himself. Dan saw him sitting inside, eating naked. When their eyes met, the hermit was almost about to kill him, but later, their relationship developed around surprisingly pleasant lines. At first, Dan had a hard time with it, especially knowing that his father, also a cop, had once taken money from the hermit. He didn’t like that part, but little by little, Dan began to see that the hermit wasn’t a bad guy. They started hanging out, drinking together, and having strange but meaningful conversations about life. They talked about loneliness and loss. Dan opened up about how after everything he’d been through, he felt like a dead man. He couldn’t see anything meaningful left in his life and just didn’t feel alive anymore. But it was the hermit, who was just as lonely, who helped Dan see things differently. He explained that even though his own life wasn’t perfect, having something to live for—his daughter and wife—kept him going. Though they didn’t visit him in his secluded forest life, just knowing they were safe gave him a reason to live.

Through these conversations, Dan found a kind of unexpected comfort. The hermit finally revealed something he hadn’t wanted to admit before—he had seen Steve at the end, right before he died. Steve’s wrists were cut open, and he was trying to end his life. The hermit didn’t stop him, didn’t call for help, and didn’t try to take him to the hospital. He believed that if a man didn’t want to live anymore, who was he to judge or make him suffer through life if he had already given up? Instead, the hermit dug a shallow grave and covered Steve’s body with dirt to offer him a bit of comfort. The hermit had wished Steve could become part of the forest, but knowing that Steve’s family had him cremated made him sad. In a strange way, this confession connected Dan and the hermit. A quiet, unspoken friendship formed between them. Dan would help the hermit when his drinking got out of control and he was found passed out in the forest. He then would take him to the hospital, though the hermit would always run away. And Dan would make him come home. Dan then started sharing about how he had wanted to have a child once, but his wife left him before they could make that happen.

Now, with Mit, Dan was learning to laugh at life again, learning how to smile through the pain. He realized how good it felt to share his grief with someone else. Talking about feelings had never been easy for Dan. He didn’t want to be a burden or bore anyone with his dark thoughts of death and ending it all. But with Mit, this wild and crazy hermit in the forest, Dan didn’t feel judged. Sure, Mit would sometimes roar like an animal, dance naked, or pretend to be dead in the woods, but Dan found that easier to deal with than being stuck in his own head, lost in his own craziness. Dan had always thought that when he was gone, no one would care, no one would mourn him. But Mit had no fear of that. He had fully accepted the idea of death and was at peace with it. Maybe Dan needed to learn that too. In a strange way, it was like Mit was teaching him how to live again, even if it meant making loud rooster noises with his mouth to cope with everything. And that was okay. In the end, Dan left Mit and his cabin behind and went back to his life. He felt okay now.

What happened to the hermit? 

But the way the hermit tried to stay aloof wasn’t true to reality. When Dan returned to the police force, he saw something that made him realize the truth. He noticed a picture of a little girl and a mother in his chief’s office—the same photo he had found in the hermit’s cabin. The hermit had called them his daughter and wife. That’s when Dan understood the full story. It turned out that the child had been taken by child services, and later her mother had tried to get her back. The girl’s father had turned into a hermit and become a drunk who disappeared, and the police had searched for him but never found him. The hermit was actually the same man—Franklin. He had left his old life behind and disappeared. Dan wanted to talk to the hermit about it and eventually learned why Franklin hated God so much. He remembered how the hermit had once urinated on a Jesus ornament to show his anger and pain. It all went back to one tragic incident: Franklin had brought a dog home, a dog his daughter wanted to play with. But the dog got frightened and attacked the girl and ended up taking one of her eyes.

After that, Franklin spiraled into guilt and self-hatred. He blamed himself for everything, and the shame turned him into the drunken man Dan had met in the forest. Franklin felt like he didn’t deserve to be with his family anymore, so he left them, believing he was only a burden. Hearing this filled Dan with a deep sense of grief. He saw how much pain Franklin had carried for so long. And then, at the end of it all, the hermit passed away too, alone in his cabin. When Dan went to check on him, he found that Franklin was already gone. His real name was Franklin, and Dan called his wife, Florence, to tell her that her husband had died. He asked if they wanted to be part of the funeral arrangements, but they said no. To them, Franklin had already been dead for years. They felt no grief, no sadness—they simply didn’t care. But that wasn’t the case for Dan. Franklin had changed his life, helped him see things differently, and pushed him to make better choices. So, to honor his friend, Dan recited Franklin’s favorite poem, wandered around the forest on his bike, and planted a tree on Franklin’s grave. He did this so Franklin could “grow into a tree,” just like he had always wanted. It was the least Dan could do to show his gratitude to the man who had made such a difference in his life.

In The Rooster’s ending, Dan decided to order another rooster, a white one just like his old one. It was clear that he didn’t want to end up lonely and broken like the hermit, isolated in the forest with nothing but his pain and regret. Dan wanted to live for something, to make his life better. Maybe getting that rooster was a small but significant step toward rebuilding his own life, as it pointed out that he had found some sense of normalcy again. It symbolized Dan’s decision to not give up, to keep moving forward, and to let go of the weight that had been dragging him down for so long. And I think this new pet wasn’t just about having company; it was Dan’s way of taking a step toward healing, toward living again.

...