The Ending Of Midnight Special Explained

When, in the film's most gorgeous and indelible scene, Alton parts ways with his mother and has his long-awaited encounter with the magical beings, a dome of light engulfs a large part of the United States' territory, and all those within its radius are suddenly allowed to see the mind-boggling structures of a world that has seemingly existed all along, just beyond our reach.

The beings who greet Alton are, themselves, made up of the same magical light that courses through him, leaving the question open of whether they are humans themselves who went through some sort of evolution process that Alton just got started on, or an altogether different species that somehow found one of theirs amongst us. The movie doesn't answer that question decisively — it doesn't even specify if that parallel world literally coexists with ours, invisible to us, or if what the beings opened was just some sort of temporary portal.

But, regardless of the answers to those questions, one thing is for sure: They are entities of higher knowledge and wisdom. The film codes them heavily as such by visually imagining their world as a hi-tech future beyond our wildest human dreams, and shows the humans' moment of contact with them as a great, universal dawning of clarity. It's safe to say that the event leaves everyone it touches fundamentally changed. All of which points back to the grand spiritual themes investigated by the film.