‘The Offering’ Ending Explained: Breaking Down the Jewish Horror Movie on Hulu 

The 2023 horror movie The Offering, which is now streaming on Hulu, is a fairly standard religious scary story, only, for once, that religion is not Christianity. Instead, The Offering—which was directed by Oliver Park, with a screenplay by Hank Hoffman—explores the mysticism of Orthodox Judaism. Specifically, it focuses on the myth of a demon who steals children.

Despite the lack of Jesus, The Offering plays out very similarly to Christian-inspired religious horror movies. You’ve got your demonic possession, your anti-demon circles of ash, and, of course, your shiny amulets. It’s not exactly a good movie, but it’s a perfectly fine way to pass the evening, especially if you’re looking for some low-stakes scares.

That said, there are a lot of moving parts to The Offering plot, and not all of them make sense. Never fear, because Decider is here to help. Read on for a breakdown of The Offering plot summary and The Offering ending, explained.

The Offering on Hulu plot summary:

Arthur (Nick Blood) and his pregnant wife Claire (Emily Wiseman) take a trip to visit Arthur’s aging father, Saul (Allan Corduner), in Brooklyn, who runs a Jewish funeral house in a Hasidic community. Art hasn’t seen his father in many years, because his father didn’t approve of his marriage to a non-Jewish woman. Saul regrets his former attitude, and is thrilled to reunite with his Art. He warmly welcomes Claire into the family. But what Saul doesn’t know is that Art is there in the hopes that his father can help him out of debt, by offering his house as collateral to the bank.

Saul’s most recent funeral is a man named Yosille (Anton Trendafilov), who we meet at the beginning of the film making a deal with a demon. Art helps prepare Yosille’s body for burial and discovers a knife stuck in his chest and a shiny amulet around his neck. Art accidentally drops the amulet, breaks it, and hides the pieces from his father. Saul finds the knife, and suspects maybe a demon was trapped inside Yosille’s body. But hey, there’s no amulet, so it can’t be that!

But of course, it is that. Art breaking the amulet releases the demon from its prison, and all sorts of weird things start happening, including the demon attacking and killing Saul. Eventually, Art pieces together what happened: Yosille made a deal with a demon to save his wife, and in return, he sacrificed a child’s life. Now Art’s wife and unborn child are trapped by the demon. Art calls up Heimish—who blames Art for Saul’s death—to help him. Heimish in turn calls a “kabbalist,” aka someone who believes in a a particular variety of Jewish mysticism, and the kabbalist comes up with a plan. Art needs to trap the demon in his body, while wearing the amulet, and then stab himself with that special knife. That will trap the demon in the amulet, apparently. He also needs to stand inside a circle of ash, no matter what visions the demon shows him. Why? It’s not explained. Don’t worry about it!

The Offering ending explained:

Spoiler alert: Art doesn’t stay inside the circle. The demon kills both the kabbalist and Heimish, which Art is fine with. But then the demon shows him his pregnant wife, and he runs out of the circle to save her. Art reads some sacred Hebrew text and invites the demon inside his body. He preps the knife to stab himself but loses the knife. Heimish, who is apparently not quite dead yet, stumbles forward with the knife in hand. Art begs Heimish to stab him, and after some hesitation, Heimish does.

Yay! The demon has been trapped… right? Nope! As Art lies dying on the floor, Heimish leans over him and says, “You should have stayed in the circle.” Art looks over and sees the real Heimish’s body dead on the floor. (So he did die!) Art also sees that he dropped the amulet outside of the circle, meaning he wasn’t wearing it when he stabbed himself. This Heimish, apparently, is the demon. The demon is not trapped; the demon is free! The demon/Heimish gets up an walks away, and Art dies.

Then we cut to Claire, who wakes up suddenly in the house. She sees Art, and steps forward to greet him… and steps right into the weird symbolic circle that she wasn’t supposed to step in! It’s really not clear what that circle does, but we do know it’s a demon thing, and it’s bad if Claire steps in it. Art asks about the baby, and when Claire says the baby is fine, Art replies “Good,” in a demon voice. In other words, this is not Art, this is the children-stealing demon, and it wants to steal Claire’s baby. We see a shot of said demon attacking Claire, and with that, the movie ends.

Look, does it make any sense? No, no it doesn’t. It’s really more about the creepy-spooky vibes than the plot. So just go with it, and enjoy the B-horror scares.