Train Dreams ending explained: Is the “wolf girl” Katie, or Robert’s grief?

Train Dreams follows Robert Grainier, a logger and railroad worker in early twentieth-century Idaho, from rough camps in the woods to an old age spent watching astronauts on a television in a Spokane shop window. The 2025 film adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella, directed by Clint Bentley and starring Joel Edgerton with Felicity Jones, William H Macy and Kerry Condon, uses Robert’s life to track how America shifts from steam trains to space travel.

Across those years, he builds a homestead with his wife Gladys and their daughter Katie, loses them when a wildfire wipes out their valley, and drifts into a solitary existence in the forest.

Late in the story, an injured feral “wolf girl” limps into his cabin, and the ending leaves viewers asking whether she is Katie miraculously returned or a vision born of grief.

Train Dreams ending explained: Is the “wolf girl” Katie, or Robert’s grief

The ending of Train Dreams begins years after the fire, when Robert has rebuilt a small cabin on the ashes of his old home and lives alone in the woods. He has never found the bodies of Gladys or Katie, so his days swing between accepting that they died in the blaze and a stubborn belief that they somehow survived.

One night, Robert is laid up with a fever and dreams of the fire. He sees Gladys in their house as the flames roar closer, grabs Katie, running through the smoke, then tripping over a fallen log and falling to his knees. Katie is left crying in the burning woods while the fire draws nearer. Robert wakes shaken and treats the dream as more than memory, a sign that his daughter might have lived through the disaster.

Soon after this dream, he hears howling outside his cabin, and an injured girl appears in the doorway. She moves cautiously, more like an animal than a visitor, with a badly hurt leg. Robert guides her inside, splints the leg, feeds her and lets her sleep in his bed while he lies on the floor. The narration notes that “he knew it was impossible,” yet the way he studies her face makes clear that he wants to believe Katie has returned. By morning, the wolf girl has slipped away, and he can only leave food on the step, hoping she is still somewhere in the trees.

The film never answers who she is. Some viewers take her as Katie, who survived and grew up half wild, others as a lost child who stumbled into the cabin, and still others as a figure produced by fever and grief. What matters is Robert’s habit of seeing more than the world in front of him. Earlier in Train Dreams, he watches a Chinese coworker named Fu Sheng being thrown from a bridge and later glimpses the man’s ghost in the trees.

The wolf girl fits that pattern of visions. Real or not, she lets him believe that Katie’s spirit is still close, which is what finally lets him endure his life.

Train Dreams plot recap: Who is Robert Grainier, and what happens to his family

Train Dreams follows Robert from boyhood to old age. He grew up in Fry, Idaho, as an orphan among loggers and railroad crews. On a bridge job, he watches a Chinese coworker named Fu Sheng being beaten and thrown into a canyon after a theft accusation while he stands frozen, a failure that becomes his deepest shame.

As an adult, Robert rides work trains across the Pacific Northwest, then meets Gladys and finally builds something of his own. Their courtship is quiet and practical as they claim land by the river and raise their daughter Katie. A sudden wildfire tears through the valley while he is away on what is meant to be his last job. He returns to find the homestead reduced to ash and no sign of his family, which pushes him to the edge of town life. Searchers never find bodies, so he is left without even the certainty of death.

In time, he rebuilds a smaller cabin on the same land, lives with a stray dog and spends a short stretch of years talking with Claire, a traveller, before slipping back into solitude.

What does the Train Dreams ending mean, from the astronaut on TV to Robert’s final plane ride

Late in life, Train Dreams moves Robert to Spokane, where he pauses at a shop window television that shows an astronaut circling Earth. He asks,

“Oh, is that…?”

And a woman answers,

“That’s us,”

and the moment quietly links his small world to the one on the screen. The film then gives him a biplane ride over the valley, the pilot warning

“Hey, you’d better hold onto something."

As the land he worked spreads out below him. In those linked images, he finally understands that his lonely life, shaped by loss and guilt, still belongs to a wider world. The ghosts of Fu Sheng and the wolf girl, the memory of Gladys and Katie, the tracks he helped lay and the astronaut circling far above all sit on the same map.

Train Dreams closes on a man who never gets a clear answer about what happened to his family, yet feels connected to “it all” for the first time, which is the quiet peace the story has been pushing him toward from the beginning.

Stay tuned for more updates.