Don’t Listen Ending & What Happened To The Witch Explained

WARNING: Major spoilers for Don’t Listen ahead

In the Spanish supernatural horror movie Don’t Listen (original Spanish title: Voces or Voices in English), the twist ending resolves the tragic story of a family of property flippers in a small town in the Spanish countryside, but the story of the witch who haunts them is left relatively unexplained. The way the movie ends also makes a statement about the mistakes people make when listening—or rather, not listening—to one another. Things start out as they do in many a haunted house movie, with the family moving into a rural mansion that has a disturbing past. The first indication that something is not quite right in the house is that there is a hole in one of the walls that seems to be infested with flies. Daniel (Rodolfo Sancho) and his wife Sara (Belén Fabra), however, don’t seem to mind this very much until it’s too late.

The second indication that something is wrong is that their young son, Eric (Lucas Blas), has been complaining about voices that he has been hearing in the house. He tells a psychologist that the voices sometimes ask him to draw pictures. After their meeting, the psychologist explains to Daniel and Sara that the family’s turbulent lifestyle is probably to blame for Eric’s behavior and that there is nothing serious to worry about. Unfortunately for her, and the whole family, she is dead wrong. One of the flies enters her ear as she is driving away from the house, and it possesses her, forcing her to crash head-on into a tree. Chillingly, Eric draws a picture of the branch that impales the psychologist’s head in the accident that kills her.

Eric continues to hear voices, and the shadowy form of a woman lurks around the house until one night, Eric goes out to the pool and drowns to death. As a result, Daniel seeks the help of skeptical paranormal investigator, Germán (Ramón Barea), who comes to the mansion with his daughter, Ruth (Ana Fernández), to assist him. They too begin to see and hear things both with their equipment and with their own senses until they discover that the house is a former court of the Spanish Inquisition. The house is known and feared locally as “The House of Voices.” By the end of the movie, they discover that the spirit of an evil witch is to blame for the haunting. Germán successfully destroys the witch, whose corpse they find in a hidden basement, but is unable to stop her from causing Sara and Daniel to take their own lives.

The Real Meaning Of Don’t Listen’s Ending

The real meaning behind the ending of Don’t Listen has everything to do with the name of the movie, both in the original Spanish—Voces or Voices—as well as in the English variation—Don’t Listen. Throughout the movie, most of the characters don’t listen to one another as well as they should. They also mistakenly listen to the witch, who uses her voice to trick people. The psychologist doesn’t listen to Eric when he tells her that he hears voices. Eric’s parents similarly don’t listen to him, brushing off his seemingly eccentric behavior as the confusion of a child. Daniel doesn’t listen to Germán, the paranormal investigator, when he tells Daniel not to pursue the source of the haunting. Even Germán doesn’t listen to Ruth when she tries to tell him they must leave after witnessing a multitude of disturbing events in the house.

The movie’s ending perfectly exemplifies this tendency not to listen to one another. Ruth wants to leave, but Germán believes that he can get to the bottom of the mystery, which could be the biggest find of his career. He convinces Ruth that they must stay. As Daniel struggles with the death of his family, the surviving trio determines that the source of the haunting must be in the mansion’s hidden basement which they access through the hole in the wall where the flies come from. Down below, they discover the dried-up corpse of a witch imprisoned in a cage. They notice that the witch’s tongue has been torn out, and they speculate that the Spanish Inquisition did this to silence the witch, as her voice is the source of her power. They decide to burn her and put an end to her haunting of the mansion.

As they prepare to destroy her, the witch masquerades as spirits from their past, using her voice to manipulate them. Both Ruth and Daniel succumb to the witch’s tricks—essentially listening to her when they shouldn’t. Germán is the only one who is able to resist her bewitching voice. He burns the witch’s remains, saving them all. Now seemingly safe from the witch’s evil machinations, Daniel finally discovers Eric’s drawings, the drawings he had told the psychologist about. They depict the movie’s gruesome events, including the boy’s own death. It turns out that Eric didn’t simply drown in the pool—it was his father, possessed by the witch, who had drowned him. Heartbroken, Daniel kills himself by the pool, which is also shown in the boy’s drawings. If he had only listened, truly listened, to his son in the beginning, all of their deaths may have been avoided.

What Happened To The Witch In Don’t Listen

Before the events of the movie, the witch was clearly targeted by the Spanish Inquisition. Although it’s only briefly shown, she, like many real-life women in the Western world in the 17th century, was suspected of being a witch, tortured, and put to death. Specifically, her tongue was torn from her mouth. The difference between her and the women historically persecuted in these witch trials is that she was truly a witch. This is why she is able to haunt the mansion that the family in Don’t Listen ultimately occupies. The house is known locally to be haunted, as is shown in the movie when Ruth speaks to a local woman. This implies that there have been many generations of occupants affected by her posthumous evil. As such, by the end of the movie, when the witch is finally burned, she has been getting revenge on the locals for centuries.

Despite the obviously evil paranoia of the Spanish Inquisition, it turns out that, in this particular case, they were right—she really was a witch. Don’t Listen doesn’t make excuses for the evils of religious persecution distributed by the Spanish Inquisition, but it also doesn’t preclude the existence of the supernatural evil of which they were so afraid.

About The Author

Steven Cuffari
(107 Articles Published)

Steven Cuffari, aka “Steve,” is a fiction writer who mostly works in the horror genre, but also in other forms of speculative fiction. As a movie and TV features writer for Screen Rant, he translates his passion for fiction into commentary and analysis. Check out his podcast at voicesfromthedark.com.

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