What happened to Alexandra's son in Wildwood? His first death wasn't his last
Wildwood's villain is a grieving mother, and every terrible thing she does in the film traces back to one boy. Before the story is over, he dies more than once.
Laika's Wildwood opens before its heroine ever appears. The first scene is set in the Impassable Wilderness, on a balcony, with a boy named Alexei and his mother, Alexandra, trying to reach him. Carey Mulligan voices Alexandra, the Dowager Governess of South Wood, and the film, which opened in U.S. theaters on October 23, 2026, spends the next two hours explaining what happened to her son.
Colin Meloy's 2011 novel tells the same story in flashback. Travis Knight's film puts it first, which changes how you watch everything Alexandra does after.
Alexei's first death
Alexandra and her husband ruled South Wood as its beloved governess and governor, and Alexei was their son. One day he rode down an unfamiliar path, his horse spooked and he fell from a mountain to his death, per The Movie Spoiler's plot summary. The ivy that covers the Wood absorbed his body, so his mother never got to bury him.
Her husband died of grief soon after; the film shows his body as a gray corpse, Plugged In notes. In the novel he has a name, Grigor.
Alexandra didn't let it end there:
- In the book: She had toymakers build Alexei a new body and used black magic to put his soul back into it, per the novel's Wikipedia summary).
- In the film: She used Alexei's last baby tooth to bind his soul to an animatronic body.
It worked, and for a while she had her son back. The trouble was that Alexei found out what he had become.
His second death
The film's opening scene is that discovery. On the balcony, the mechanical Alexei strikes his own chest hard enough to crack it and tears a gear out of the mechanism inside. He sheds what looks like a red tear and jumps. The crowd below sees the gears, the new governor, Lars Svik (Marc Evan Jackson), orders Alexandra arrested, and she goes into exile.
The novel handles it in a single line: Alexei destroyed a vital part of himself, causing his second death. The film turns it into its first image. Wildwood is rated PG-13, and parents of younger kids should know it opens with a child taking his own life, even if that child is made of gears.
Alexandra brought her son back from the dead, and the first thing he did with his second life was refuse it.
Her plan for a third try
Everything else in Wildwood is Alexandra trying again. The film changes her goal from the book's. In the novel, she wants to feed Prue's baby brother Mac to the ivy so it will consume the Wood. In the film, she wants control of the ivy itself, so she can recover Alexei's real body and bring him back one more time.
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Mac is the key because of a deal made before he was born. Prue's parents could only have children through a bargain with Alexandra, and the price was their second child, whose blood carries magic. That's why the crows take him.
The plan fails at the last moment. When Alexandra goes to sacrifice Mac, the ivy forms a tornado of vines around him. Prue commands it with her own blood, and the ivy impales Alexandra and absorbs her body.
The ivy swallowed Alexei's body before his mother could bury him. In the end, it took hers the same way.
Alexei never comes back a third time. His first death was an accident, and his second was his own choice. The third return was only ever his mother's plan, and the ivy that kept his body is where she ends up too.
Previously we wrote: Wicker end credits, explained: whether Alexander Skarsgård's wicker husband gets one last scene