The Ending Of Bone Cold Finally Explained

"Bone Cold" is a 2022 indie movie that somehow straddles the line between war story, personal drama, and creature feature. The film follows two military specialists sent on a top-secret assassination mission in Ukraine, but when they arrive, they quickly realize that they've bitten off more than they can chew. "Bone Cold" is similar to "American Sniper," if Bradley Cooper's character also had to contend with a bloodthirsty monster that was fueled by his own PTSD.

"Bone Cold" uses its lightly supernatural premise to ask questions about trauma, guilt, and connection. The story constantly keeps you guessing, and whether you're trying to follow the monster or the war intrigue, you'll never know what's coming around the next corner. Fittingly, the movie also ends on a moment that raises more questions than it answers, so as the credits roll you'll be left to your musings trying to unpack what happened. Luckily, you don't have to piece together all the hints and clues on your own. We're here to break down the supernatural and the symbolic to get to the bottom of what the ending of "Bone Cold" really means.

"Bone Cold" opens with a look at Jon Bryant (Jonathan Stoddard) and Marco Miller (Matt Munroe) on the job. The two of them are elite snipers for the U.S. military who get sent all around the world to take out high-priority targets. As the two of them are returning from a mission, we get a sense that they each have a wildly different relationship to their job. Miller seems to be at peace with what the two of them do for a living and accepts that death is part of the job. However, assassinating people is beginning to take a toll on Bryant's mental health.

When Bryant gets home, he tries to decompress from the mission by spending time with his wife Mel (Jennifer Khoe) and his daughter Wendy (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), but before he even has time to get his head out of the game, Colonel Nathan Bernham (Shaan Sharma) calls him back in for another job. When Bryant and Miller arrive at headquarters, they're told the next mission will take them to Ukraine, where they'll be tasked with stealthily eliminating a Russian operative.

Not long after they get on the ground, Bryant and Miller realize something is wrong with this mission. A team sent before them failed to pull off the assassination, and as they make their way through the woods, Bryant begins noticing a mysterious figure following them. As their paranoia rises, the mission suddenly takes a turn for the worse.

Bryant and Miller arrive at a house where they believe their target is staying. They can see an older man sitting inside, but they aren't immediately able to identify him. They decide to wait until he steps out of the house to take the shot, but after Bryant kills the man, his commanding officer radios in to say that the target is still alive — they killed the wrong person.

Bryant has trouble dealing with the guilt, and he starts seeing the shadowy monster that is following them more and more. At one point, Bryant becomes convinced the monster is about to attack, and he shoots at it, which alerts some nearby Russian soldiers. Bryant and Miller try to fight their way out of the woods, and as bullets start flying, they manage to kill their target, but Miller also gets shot and dies. The monster attacks Bryant and rips open his stomach, but then he seems to magically recover, and he makes his way home.

At home, Bryant struggles to keep it together even more. He becomes convinced that the military set him up to fail, and he repeatedly sees the monster skulking outside his house. Things reach a boiling point when Bryant starts shooting at the monster, tearing apart his house and terrifying Mel and Wendy. Mel talks Bryant down and convinces him to get the help he needs, but the movie ends by revealing that he does have scars on his stomach from where the monster attacked him.

It turns out Bryant's paranoia isn't entirely off the mark. He becomes obsessed with the idea that Colonel Bernham set him up to fail, and he's not exactly wrong. Shortly before Bryant's paranoia about the monster reaches its peak, he heads back to headquarters to confront Bernham. Bryant tells Bernham that it was the military's bad information that led to him killing the wrong man in Ukraine, and after some initial resistance Bernham relents and admits that Bryant is right.

Bernham reveals that he set Bryant up to kill the wrong man on purpose. The real Russian terrorist that Bryant and Miller were sent to kill was deep in hiding, and the military had no clue where to find him — but they were able to find his brother. Knowing that Bryant would refuse to kill an innocent man, Bernham fed him bad information to get him to take the shot. With his brother dead, the real terrorist came out of hiding, and that's when Bryant and Miller found their opening for what was supposed to be the real mission all along.

The military didn't plan on Miller dying in the field. They just wanted to make sure that the target was killed, and they were willing to bend the rules and risk the lives of Bryant and Miller to make that happen. Bryant is understandably furious after finding out the truth, and that stress probably contributes to the monster manifesting inside his home later that night.

Maybe Bryant and Miller should have known from the very beginning that their mission wasn't going to go as planned. When Colonel Bernham briefs the two of them on their objective, they ask if anyone else had been sent in for this particular assassination. Bernham says yes, but that the other team had failed, so Bryant and Miller are meant to be their replacements.

We never get to meet the other team that was supposedly sent in ahead of Bryant and Miller, but it's hard not to doubt their existence. Later in the movie Colonel Bernham says that he purposefully set up the mission to look complicated and confusing, so there would be some plausible deniability when the wrong target got shot first. With that in mind, it seems very likely that the colonel made up the first team and its failure. If he did, he'd be able to kill two birds with one stone by making the mission look more complicated than it really was and by talking Bryant and Miller into agreeing to it in the first place.

Sveta (Elise Greene) leads the small group of Russians who stumble onto Bryant and Miller after Bryant fires his gun at the monster. She's also a sniper, and she's the only member of the Russian team that poses any real threat to our two heroes. Sveta is the one who ultimately guns down Miller, though in doing so she reveals her location to Bryant and seals her fate.

Even though Sveta only has one line in the entire movie, Greene's performance tells us everything we need to know about the character. When she fires her first shot in the film we see her grin maniacally, which is the movie's way of letting us know she's the polar opposite of Bryant. She doesn't feel any guilt about killing — quite the opposite in fact — and she never hesitates when she sees her opening.

Sveta's total lack of remorse makes her role in the story even more important. Shortly before she dies, Sveta sees the same monster as Bryant, and that means the creature is more than just a representation of personal guilt and trauma. Whether or not the creature exists, the fact that Sveta can see it tells us that it represents something more than the emotional state of individual characters. It hunts down anyone who kills other people, not just people who end up regretting the lives they take.

Three different people catch at least a glimpse of the creature. Bryant sees it first, but sometime after he and Miller kill the wrong man, Miller sees it too. Then, as the fighting in Ukraine reaches a climax, Sveta sees the creature just before Bryant kills her. Everyone who sees the monster has a slightly different relationship with it, though only Bryant seems to be truly haunted by it. He's the most concerned about the monster throughout the movie, and of course, he's the only one who the monster seems to be following around.

All of that begs the question: Is the monster real? Even though many different characters catch sight of it, there's very little evidence that the creature actually exists. Unlike other horror movie spirits, this creature doesn't have any physical effects on the world. Bryant thinks he sees it kill Miller, but it was Sveta's gun that did that. Then Bryant gets attacked by the creature, but he's able to stand up and walk to an extraction point right away.

Whether or not the creature exists, in the movie, it stands in as a representation of trauma, guilt, and the mark that killing leaves on a person's consciousness — whether or not they're willing to acknowledge it. The movie drops just one small hint that might mean the monster does exist, but we'll get to that in just a minute.

Bryant's wife Mel is a painter, and she takes some of her inspiration from her husband's job. There's one painting of hers that the movie pays particular attention to. Bryant first notices it when he's home on his 24-hour leave. It shows a person with a huge streak of color moving through its head. Mel has a different outlook on Bryant's job than he does, but even though seeing the painting upsets him, he shakes it off and gets called back to work the very next day.

When Bryant returns home from Ukraine, he can't escape the painting quite so easily. The night that Bryant thinks the monster has gotten into the house, flashing images of the painting factor into his breakdown. In a way, that painting is the monster in the house because the simple fact of it existing means that Bryant can't escape the guilt he feels about the work he does as a sniper.

The painting also symbolizes the hugely disorienting divide between Bryant's home and work lives. Out on a mission, he's cold and calculating, and his work is messy and marked by death. At home, his job boils down to fun stories that his wife can romanticize with art. Bryant can't reconcile those differences, and they make him feel disconnected from his family and even more guilty about the lives he's taken.

Like all good horror movie monsters, the one in "Bone Cold" represents the internal struggle of the movie's main character. We've already talked about how the monster works as a stand-in for guilt, and how it appears to follow afflicted people even if they feel no remorse for what they've done. From that perspective, the monster affects Bryant the most because he deeply regrets the lives he's taken. By the end of the movie, Bryant is on the path to healing from what he's done, which should mean the monster is going to leave him alone. Or does it?

At the very end of the movie, Bryant faces the camera for a few seconds, and we're able to see that he has scars on his stomach that mark exactly where the monster attacked him in Ukraine. There are some actions the monster takes that have an obvious real-world antecedent — like when it "kills" Miller — but this particular attack isn't one of them. We didn't see anything else happen to Bryant that would explain those particular scars. 

So we're back to asking if the monster is real or not. The movie manages to have things both ways. Most of the time the monster is just a symbolic figure, and the real story here is all about Bryant's crisis of conscience. The ending somewhat recontextualizes everything that came before, leaving us with some implication that a supernatural — and seriously creepy — situation is unfolding in Bryant's home.

Billy Hanson is the writer and director behind "Bone Cold," which just so happens to be his first feature-length film. Hanson's previous work includes shorts like "Total Ghostage," "Survivor Type," and "Apology Day" as well as two different TV miniseries, "Coach Hop Playlist" and "Lightning Dogs." Hanson also works on the business side of things, and in 2023 he worked as a producer on the series "Eli Roth Presents: The Legion of Exorcists."

In an interview with Deepest Dream, Hanson talked about his creative process and specifically how the full story of "Bone Cold" came to be. "It started from really, basically, one image that popped into my head. It was this one man on his own holding a rifle, running through the snowy woods, and there's a creepy monster in the distance." Hanson started asking himself questions about that image to slowly piece together details about the man, the monster, and the entire context surrounding the two of them.

Hanson knew that this starting image — and the emotions it invoked for him — would be the center of the entire film, but building around that allowed him to take the story in unexpected directions. "I think that's one of the big reasons why it's not necessarily just an action film or just horror, you know, it's not one thing, it kind of walks between several lines." By keeping his focus small, Hanson was able to expand the movie beyond what it first appeared to be and create a multilayered story.

Anyone who doesn't enjoy ambiguous endings is going to struggle with "Bone Cold," as the movie leaves so much unanswered. We don't know if Bryant will be able to make a full recovery and repair his relationship with his family. We don't know the full extent of what happened in Ukraine, and we don't have any solid information about the creature that caused so much chaos.

If you need all the loose ends of a story wrapped up to feel satisfied, you'll probably walk away from "Bone Cold" wishing for a sequel to provide you with all the answers. Unfortunately, the chances of that happening are pretty slim. Writer-director Billy Hanson has said that the budget for "Bone Cold" was seriously constrained, which forced him and the others working on the movie to get extra creative when it came to bringing certain scenes to life. Getting some cast members back and finding another sizable budget to make a follow-up would be a serious struggle. Adding to that challenge is the fact that "Bone Cold" didn't have a full theatrical release, and the streaming platforms it ultimately landed on didn't give it much of a chance to turn a profit. For now, it looks like "Bone Cold" will be a one-and-done, and we're all going to have to find a way to get comfortable living with the ambiguity of the film's ending.