The Sticks Movie Ending Explained And Full Story: Is Beth Alive Or Dead?

If Into the Wild wasn’t enough of a lesson for you to not venture out into the woods alone, Peter Kominek’s The Sticks does a pretty fair and creepy job of convincing you to not pack your bags for a camping trip anytime soon. With a fairly modest budget and a few actors, Kominek’s film offers a good slow-burn forest horror with some genuinely good gross and scary visuals from time to time. It makes you genuinely worried for the protagonist, played by Shelby Cox-Dersch, who’s also the writer of the film. It’s one of those films where you’re mostly speculating over what’s real and what’s not, and the fact that the script has enough substance to make you want to keep guessing is always a good thing. 

Spoilers Ahead

What happens in the film? 

The Sticks begins in the woods, where we see Beth, a lonely woman with her face all scratched up, and all she has is a backpack, which has some tan spray, a pack of almonds, a bottle of water, and some rope. From the looks of it, she’s scared of someone or something chasing her, and with no change of clothes, she manages to keep her white tank top fairly clean. She gets some visions, which indicate that her boyfriend, Matt, is probably dead or missing. When she tries to follow the river to get out of the woods, she ends up in the same place, where there is a strange rock formation made of yellow rocks arranged in a circle. She manages to catch a fish but can’t light a fire to cook it. When she buries the fish, she finds that somebody’s stolen it the next morning and even left a weird marking on the supposed headstone. Her ripped jeans’ pocket is miraculously fixed, and she even has the tin can consisting of cigarettes and a lighter that she didn’t have a day before. A quick flashback tells us that Beth met Matt at a local pub, and she pretty much wooed him into asking her out by sheer will. Matt was always an outgoing, nature-loving man who liked to go on hikes and camps, and he started taking Beth on his trips after they got together. However, in the present, Beth is stuck and completely alone in a forest where mysterious things keep happening; she can’t find a way out. 

Does the lady in the camp save Beth? 

When Beth tries to cross the river to go to the other side, even then she’s held back by something pulling her down. When she somehow makes it out, she finds that her clothes and bag are hung nicely to dry, and everything is ready to use. She sleeps with a makeshift blanket on her, also a gift from the forest, when she wakes up, she’s found by a girl her age. This is her first real hope of survival, and the girl takes Beth to her camp. She claims that her husband has gone to ask for help, but soon Beth starts feeling something is off. The cup the girl has offered her is empty, and she suddenly turns into this grotesque witch who picks her own skin and squishes it to fill the cup with “tea.” Beth sees a Reaper-like creature outside the tent for a moment, and she runs for her life. Outside, there’s a naked man who’s gnawing on the same fish she caught a day ago, she then ends up in a cave where there are even more disgusting-looking creatures lurking around. She sees visions of Mark proposing to her with a bloody ring, she also sees the same symbol carved on her skin as the rock formation earlier. Beth eventually collapses after crossing the river for the second time, ending up in the middle of the rock formation once again. 

What’s wrong with Mark? 

Now let’s get out of the forest and find out what exactly happened that led Beth to be stuck there all alone. At first, the film tries to make you think that Mark was this amazing guy that Beth was so happy with, and he probably died in a car crash, which left her in this condition. Nope, not the case. So Beth and Mark had a pretty dreamy life—camping, dancing, and completely in love with each other. But like most love stories, their love for each other fizzled too. Six years later, we see Mark can’t even stand Beth, even when she’s trying to be cute or funny. And you can tell it’s a recurring experience for Beth, as she’s started smoking in secrecy, something she was planning to quit when they got together. But Beth stumbles into a secret cellar in their garage, and the cellar is full of boxes with the same symbol as we’ve been seeing throughout the film. When Beth opens one of these boxes, she finds a picture of a girl, and it’s the same girl she saw in the forest, well, before she turned into a witch. There’s also an ID, which says she went to the same college as Mark, and a strand of her hair. Now it’s pretty clear that Mark isn’t so outdoorsy just out of his love for nature, and before Beth could process any of this, he knocks her out and takes her on a drive, which was intended to be her last. 

Is Beth Alive Or Dead? 

Mark stops the car on a road that leads to the deep areas of the woods, and he goes on a rant about how Beth’s smoking is the reason he’d never be able to trust her again. Beth is not so unconscious anymore, as she hears this mad killer going on and on about how he wasted six years of his life on her only for it to end like this. Just when he’s about to kill her, Beth kicks him and jumps out of the running car, and that’s how she ended up here. Now in present time, Mark has finally found Beth, and after a long and intense chase, he tries to manipulate her into thinking that he’s not a killer. He tells Beth that she’s been doing too much pot, and when they fought, she ran away from the house. He adds layers to this theory and throws a big, puzzling punch at her when he says that she must be seeing things, which is partially true, but those things aren’t hallucinations. Mark even tries to convince her that it has only been a day and not a week, as there’s no way that his soft and spoiled girlfriend can survive a whole week out in these woods. But Beth catches on to his lies when she sees her belt peeking out of his pocket, the very same belt he tried to kill her with earlier. She uses the tan spray on his eyes and leads him to the witch’s tent, hoping she’d take care of this madman. But Mark bites the witch’s fingers off, and when she leads him to the cave of monsters, he even manages to survive that. When he finally gets his hands on Beth, he kicks her like a rag doll and keeps punching her in the face, planning to kill her just like that. But as Beth is counting her final breaths, her fingers touch some blood pouring out of the ground, and the Reaper shows up. The Reaper kills Mark with some kind of voodoo, and by the end of the film, Beth manages to survive her serial killer cult worshipper maniac boyfriend, although her face might take a year to recover from that merciless beating. My final thoughts are, I really wish she had listened to her friend when she started dating this guy. 

...