The Ending of ‘Knuckleball’ Movie Explained: Did Henry Continue the Family Legacy?

‘Knuckleball’ is a 2018 horror-thriller directed by Michael Peterson, starring Michael Ironside, Munro Chambers, and Luca Vicallis. The movie follows a 12-year-old boy, Henry, who goes to visit his grandpa on a semi-isolated farm, and the visit turns into an absolutely incomprehensible nightmare for everyone involved. ‘Knuckleball’ is a dark and dangerous version of ‘Home Alone,’ and honestly, it’s not a very good movie, all things considered, but it does have some superb intense moments that keep you invested in the story just enough that you keep caring about what the story will turn out to be.

Unlike the aforementioned ‘Home Alone, ‘ ‘Knuckleball’ doesn’t have a wholesome family-oriented message to deliver, but it does have a confusing ending, and this is what we’re here to explain.

Henry goes to visit his loner grandpa, but his mom knows that there’s something darker lurking in her childhood home

The first character we meet is young Henry, a 12-year-old boy who is about to be dropped on his grandfather’s farm because his parents are going out of town and need someone to keep watch over young Henry. His parents, Mary and Paul, keep bickering, and it’s obvious that their marriage has problems, but don’t worry, you don’t have to keep track of that subplot since it leads absolutely nowhere.

Henry is just like any other boy; he is deeply invested in his video games, but unlike most children his age, he is rather perceptive and bright and manages to warn his father to take a turn he would otherwise miss, messing up their whole journey. Before arriving at her father’s place, Mary has a confession to make. She tells Paul that contrary to popular belief, her mother did not die of cancer; she committed suicide, and this is why she doesn’t like spending time in her childhood home.

Mary’s mother apparently found out about her father’s affair and couldn’t live with it and decided to take her own life; she never forgave her father and distanced herself from him at every opportunity.

Arriving at the farm, they are greeted by Jacob, Mary’s father. He is a bit of a hardass and not the one to make a small-talk. He lives isolated but close to a nearby town, and he doesn’t have a landline; his only means of communication with the outside world is a phone in his neighbor’s house. Jacob takes over Henry, and Mary and Paul depart.

Henry does have a cell with him, but it’s doubtful how much signal he will catch with the biggest snowstorm in the recent decades brewing on the horizon.

Who is Dixon & how is he related to Jacob?

Immediately after greeting his grandfather, Henry is given work to do; since Jacob lives alone, he pretty much runs the farm by himself, and it’s hard work maintaining the home that has been in his family for generations. Jacob is a quiet man and doesn’t really say much, but it’s obvious that he is trying hard to be a good role model for Henry.

Henry finds a dead dog under a blue tarp, and after the initial shock wears off, Jacob tells him that the dog died only recently and that he loved the beast. Jacob also finds some other dangerous stuff around the farm, like barbed wire and plenty of other tools that can seriously injure a child. There’s also a rabid barn cat on the estate that hisses and whirs at Henry as soon as he gets close to it, luckily Henry is quite clever and skilled and manges to devise a trap for the cat.

We don’t know what Henry initially planned to do with the cat, but he ultimately let her go. While working to secure his house in the event of a severe storm, Jacob almost falls down the makeshift scaffolding after suffering what seems like a warning heart attack. He continues working without complaint, and later, he spends some quality time playing ball with Henry, teaching him how to throw.

At some point, Jacob sends Henry to fetch some wood for the stove, and Henry complies, but while going to the woodshed, he meets the neighbor, Dixon. Dixon apparently helps out Jacob with various tasks around the farm, and he is eager to show Henry around the place, giving him a tour. However, Jacob interrupts them and chases Henry away.

Henry goes away but continues to observe what appears to be a weird exchange; Jacob smacks Dixon over the head and tells him to leave.

Once inside, Jacob prepares dinner for himself and Henry and elaborates on his relationship with Dixon. He is apparently a “good kid,” almost like a son to him and Jacob took care of him for much of his childhood, now Dixon returns the favor by helping him out. Henry asks why he smacked him on the head, and Jacob explains that he needed to remind him of something.

The grandfather and grandson bond for quite some time and Jacob explains his life philosophy: you try to fix as many things as you can, and then you die. After saying “I love you” to Henry, both retreat to their rooms, and Henry has no idea that this is the last time he sees Jacob alive.

What did Jacob die off?

In the morning, Henry wakes up and decides to make some breakfast for himself and his grandfather. After he finished, he made his way to Jacob’s room and tried to wake him up. After touching his arm, Henry notices that Jacob is unusually cold, and after noticing the purplish hue of his face, the only conclusion that he can come to is that Jacob is dead.

It was never stated what exactly killed Jacob, but based on his coloration and the chest pains he experienced earlier, we can assume that it was a heart attack. Henry, now panicking, wants to contact his parents, but since he forgot his charger, he has enough battery left for a single call. He leaves his parents a message that Jacob is dead, and he has no idea what to do, and he needs help.

After that, the only thing that he can do is make his way to Dixon’s house and hope that Dixon can either help him or help him contact his parents. In the hotel room, Paul and Mary listen to Henry’s message, but due to static and lack of cell reception, the only things that they can hear are “grandpa” and “help me.” Mary starts panicking instantly. They decide to leave immediately but order a welfare check to Jackob’s house.

Dixon turns out to be a monster

Henry arrives at Dixon’s house, and he can’t see it, but Dixon is watching some kind of video of a woman being tortured. Henry tells him what happened, and he and Dixon return to Jacob’s house to inspect what took place. Dixon quickly ushers Henry back to his house, offering him food and whatever he really needs. While they are not in the house, Mary and Paul make a call to Dixon’s house, but no one is there to answer it.

Once Dixon and Henry returned back to the house, Henry wanted to contact his parents, but Dixon lied that the landline was down and not working due to an impending storm. Henry asks once again to at least try, but Dixon is starting to get annoyed with the boy. Dixon offers to make them soup and sandwiches and offers him some juice. Henry declines, but Dixon insists; while pouring his coke into a glass, Dixon accidentally drops a plastic bottle of sedatives on the floor, which he plans on using on Henry to put him to sleep.

Henry realizes that something is wrong but plays along. He notices that a lot of things are off regarding Dixon. While Dixon is not looking, Henry manages to switch their glasses and once food arrives, Dixon challenged Henry to a drinking contest, naturally Dixon wins and unowingly drinks sedated juice that he was preparing for young Henry.

Henry asks him about the laptop that he has on his sofa, and Dixon explains that it’s for work and not to be touched, a few seconds later Dixon asks Henry what kind of games he plays and Henry explains that his favorite games are Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty.

Dixon starts bragging about being a superior Call of Duty player, and Henry calls him out on his previous lie, as he claimed he doesn’t use his laptop for games. Dixon gets mad and tells him that he is a real smartass and that sort of behavior wouldn’t fly with Jacob. He starts making vague threats as his body is going numb.

He realizes that Henry has switched the glasses and that he is about to fall asleep. As Henry runs back to Jacob’s house, we can see that Dixon has fallen into some kind of psychosis and is talking to what appears to be the deceased Jacob. Jacob tells him that Henry was supposed to be off-limits due to being of “Mary’s bloodline,” but now that he is gone, this is going to be the most challenging hunt yet since Henry is really smart.

Henry prepares the house for Dixon

Henry returns home and immediately starts preparing traps for Dixon. He collects the barbed wire and various chemicals to create some kind of highly flammable concoction. A few hours later, Dixon collected himself just enough that he was ready to hunt down Henry. He is still having visions of Jacob who tells him that Henry prepared himself while he was alone in the house and he won’t go down without a fight.

Meanwhile, in the nearby town, Officer Munroe gets a request for a welfare check and starts making her way toward Jacob’s house, unaware of what will take place.

Dixon arrives at the house, and he has no idea what awaits him; Henry is trying to use a crawlspace to hide himself and makes a misdirection by throwing a toothbrush at the old water heater. Dixon takes the bait and starts descending to the basement but gets caught in the barbed wire and falls down the stairs. Henry appears on the top of the stairs, throws a couple of bottles of flammable chemicals on Dixon, and sets him on fire.

Henry has a kitchen knife in his backpack and wants to finish the job, but the fire doesn’t last nearly enough to become life-threatening to Dixon, and he awakes and attacks Henry viciously. Henry escapes, and at first, Dixon thinks that he escaped outside of the house, but Jacob appears to him once again, telling him that he needs to be smarter.

At that moment, Dixon notices that despite freshly fallen snow sticking to the ground, there is a clear lack of fresh footsteps in the snow that lead away from the house. Dixon also notices that the pantry doors are closed, and Jacob never closes the pantry. He breaks into the pantry using a baseball bat, but Henry hides in the cabinet at the last moment. Once again, his hiding place has been found, and now Dixon finally has him where he wants him.

Dixon turns out to be Jacob’s son as well

Henry slashes Dixon with another knife once again and manages to escape upstairs into the room where Jacob’s body is still lying on the bed. Dixon greets the deceased Jacob with “Hi, Dad” and comments that Jacob never let him call him that. Now, the connection between the two makes sense. As it turns out, the affair that Mary was talking about really did happen, and Dixon was the product of that, but Mary never knew that part. She was always suspicious of Dixon, but she never managed to figure out that he was her half-brother.

It’s obvious that Dixon has loads of psychological issues related to abuse and abandonment as Jacob always considered him “lesser” in his eyes, and now he is taking out his frustration, sick fetishes, and anger on Henry.

Meanwhile, Mary recounts her story of how she found her mother after she committed suicide. As it turned out, she never left a suicide note or anything, and a few years later, Jaco sat Mary down and told her that he “showed” Mary’s mother his true face, and she couldn’t handle it, and she committed suicide.

Soon after Mary’s mother committed suicide, Jacob started taking in Dixon “like some kind of stray dog.”

It’s quite possible that Mary’s mother found out about Jacob’s “extracurricular” activities and decided to kill herself, or she threatened to call the police and Jacob killed her. In any case, his psychopathy turned out to be the real reason behind her suicide and not the affair.

Henry discovers something sick in the shed

Back at Jacob’s house, Dixon is ready to kill Henry but is interrupted by the arrival of office Munroe, who finally arrives at the scene. She notices that the doors are opened in the middle of a snowstorm and suspects foul play. Dixon presumably went downstairs after locking Henry in the upstairs bedroom, and he went to deal with the cop. To get Munroe’s attention, Henry breaks the window screaming, and Dixon uses the distraction to smack her in the head; the police officer tries to crawl toward the gun that she dropped, but Dixon finishes her off with a baseball bat.

The hunt is once again on, and Henry escapes from the house, this time for real, by escaping via the roof. He finds the perfect hiding place in the shed and accidentally finds the entrance to the secret basement. Once there, Henry is shocked to find a woman in the cage, trapped like an animal. The woman tells him he is not supposed to be here, but when she figures that Henry is in danger, she tells him how to load up the shotgun, and Henry hands her the rifle.

Dixon eventually figures out where Henry is hiding and makes his way downstairs; he tells him how he was always supposed to end up here and finally notices that the woman is holding the gun. He calls the woman his mother and tells her to drop her gun, but she shoots him instead. Before he dies, Dixon shoots his mother dead. As Dixon dies, Henry picks up the bat and thinks about hitting Dixon with it but ultimately decides against it.

Henry returns to the house, and the next morning, the police arrive to check up on Officer Munroe, who is currently lying dead in the snow; the policeman finds Henry in rough condition, and soon after, we can see first responders flooding the scene, taking the bodies away. Mary and Paul arrive at the scene. They are ready to take Henry away, and as they are leaving the property, Henry can see a vision of Jacob waving to him.

Who is the real villain, Jacob or Dixon?

Now, since the movie is really open-ended and never actually gives you closure regarding who, what, and how, I developed a theory on what I consider to be the proper way to understand the movie. Jacob is ultimately the primary villain of the movie, as he spent his whole life being a psychopath who liked to torture women on the side. He married Mary’s mother because he loved her, and he considered this bloodline “pure.”

But, due to this “bloodline” being pure, he didn’t have a worthy successor for his “hobbies,” and this is where the neighbor and Dixon come in. Jacob had an affair with Dixon’s mom, and once Jacob was of age, Jacob trapped Dixon’s mom in the basement so he could groom Dixon into becoming a monster like him. Since Mary’s mother has become suspicious at this point, he had to come clean, and this killed her, or he killed her; we will never know.

Dixon was groomed into becoming a cold-blooded killer; Jacob didn’t really consider him his son, only a successor to his twisted “urges” and activities. This is why he didn’t want Dixon calling him “dad,” and this is why he rarely let him in the house; he tried not to think about Dixon as his real family; his real family was Mary and Henry. This only grew the resentment that Dixon was already feeling, and he couldn’t wait to get his hands on either Mary or Henry as he considered himself “inferior.”

Due to the fact that Dixon was aware of the existence of a secret basement, it’s likely that he was aware that his mother was trapped there; who knows, he might be the one to put her there, planning to do god knows with her.

As far as his “visions” go, it’s likely that Dixon inherited some kind of schizophrenia from Jacob, and this is what leads us to the last part. Despite Jacob considering Henry and Mary’s bloodline “pure,” we can see certain “signs” that Henry is growing up to be a psychopath as well.

First, Henry didn’t cry or react much at all when he saw the dead dog under the tarp; second, instead of leaving the rabid farm cat alone, he attempted to trap it, but ultimately, he released her before further damage could be done. He also had way too many ideas on how to hurt Dixon for a 12-year-old child, which leads me to believe that he thought about this kind of scenario often.

Ultimately, after Dixon lay dead on the floor, Henry wanted to smack him with a bat, but ultimately left him alone. When Henry is seen leaving the farm with his parents, he can see a vision of Jacob, which can be understood as Henry “inheriting the gift,” so whichever mental illness was causing both Jacob and Dixon to be monsters, it’s likely that Henry has it as well.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below!