What happens at the end of 6 Souls? The film saves its cruellest trick for the final seconds

It flopped with critics and at the box office, but its ending has kept people googling for over a decade, mostly because of what happens after the story appears to be over.

Spoilers from here.

The setup

Moore plays Cara Harding, a forensic psychiatrist who has built a career debunking multiple personality claims. Her father (Jeffrey DeMunn) introduces her to a patient who is sometimes able-bodied Adam Sabre and sometimes wheelchair-using David Bernburg. Cara's research turns up the problem: David was a real person, murdered in 1983. A third personality, rocker Wesley Crite, died in 1994. The patient isn't fragmenting — he's collecting.

Who Adam really is

The man is Christian Moore, a fraudulent faith healer from the 1918 flu epidemic. When his charlatanism was exposed, the mountain healer known as Granny sucked the soul out of his body, packed his mouth with soil so it couldn't return, and cursed the empty body to serve as a "shelter" for the faithless. Ever since, he has been taking the souls of people who abandoned their belief — which now includes Cara's family.

The final act, in order

• Cara's father vomits soil and dies, his soul taken over the phone.
• Her brother Stephen is killed when Moore comes for the family.
• Her daughter Sammy, already marked and sick, has her soul sucked out.
• Cara kills Moore — strangling him and impaling his neck on a protruding root.
• The trapped souls escape the body as he dies, and Sammy's corpse gasps back to life.

Mother and daughter reunited, curse broken. That's what the scene looks like for about thirty seconds.

The trick in the final seconds

Then Sammy starts humming — a tune written by David Bernburg, which the real Sammy never heard. The implication: the soul that settled back into her body isn't hers. Maybe it's David's. Maybe the souls scattered into the wrong bodies entirely. Maybe it's Moore himself, with the whole cycle ready to restart in a nine-year-old. The film never says. One hum, cut to credits — the entire twist delivered without a line of dialogue.