The Parenting: Why Were Rohan and Josh’s Families Ultimately the Targets of This Demonic Possession?

Spoiler warning: This article discusses plot details and the ending of The Parenting (2025), streaming on Max.

Rohan (Nik Dodani) and Josh’s (Brandon Flynn) families were not selected for any particular quality. Brenda (Parker Posey), the property manager who has been serving the demon Andras for decades, needed renters at the farmhouse during the Worm Moon night, the annual spring full moon that opens the only ritual window in which Andras can permanently claim a human body. The families happened to book the place. What made the situation worse was a detail central to Andras’s nature: the demon draws power from conflict and division, and two very different sets of parents forced into the same house for a first introduction provided exactly that. The Parenting, directed by Craig Johnson from a script by Kent Sublette, premiered on Max on March 13, 2025.

Brenda’s Long Game and the Rigged House

Brenda has been running the farmhouse as a rental property for decades, converting it into a trap specifically designed to deliver human vessels to Andras. Her obligation to the demon did not begin as a deliberate arrangement. Decades before the weekend gathering, teenage Brenda and her friend Allie, who lived at the farmhouse, summoned Andras from a dark magic book to frighten Allie’s mother. The demon killed Allie’s mother and her brother. When Allie stepped outside the protective circle to intervene, Andras killed her too. Brenda was spared on one condition: she would periodically find the demon a suitable human vessel.

The summoning phrase, “Ego Sum Tibi Andras,” which translates roughly as “I offer myself to you, Andras,” is now embedded in the property’s Wi-Fi password. Anyone who reads it aloud risks triggering a possession. Brenda had been waiting more than forty years to complete her handover to the demon.

Why Frank Was the One Possessed

Frank (Brian Cox), Rohan’s adoptive father, ended up as Andras’s first host because he was the person who read the Wi-Fi password aloud in the middle of the night while his wife Sharon (Edie Falco) slept. Several reviews of the film describe Frank as emotionally reserved and habitually the quietest presence in the room, and the film frames this as making him easier for Andras to manipulate once the possession took hold. According to a demonology book the characters discover during the film, Andras has the face of a raven on a man’s body, a design drawn from actual occult texts in which Andras is listed as a Marquis of Hell. In Frank’s body, the demon takes a more conventional horror-movie form: spinning head, raspy voice, and scenes of projectile vomiting that Cox plays primarily for comedy. The possessed Frank voices homophobic remarks, which Frank explicitly disavows once the demon is gone.

Brenda had hoped Andras would claim a younger body, preferably Josh or Rohan, but the accident of who read the password first settled the question.

What Andras Actually Exploits

Andras feeds on conflict and division between people, and the weekend between the two families carried that in abundance before any supernatural event began. Frank and Sharon are traditional, academically oriented parents with high expectations, while Josh’s parents, Liddy (Lisa Kudrow) and Cliff (Dean Norris), are relaxed to the point of creating friction with the other pair. Josh’s attempts to connect with Rohan’s parents were already under strain when the possession escalated the tensions further.

The film’s position is clear: the demon cannot gain a permanent foothold in a family that stops fighting each other. This is why Brenda needed renters whose combined tensions could hold through the Worm Moon window, not just any guests who happened to say the password.

The Worm Moon as a Hard Deadline

The Worm Moon, the full moon that falls in early spring, functions in the film as a rigid ritual constraint. Andras can only finalize possession of a human host on this specific night and under exact ceremonial conditions: the possessed host must cross a circle of fire Brenda has drawn around the property before the window closes, at which point control becomes permanent. Brenda mentions the Worm Moon’s approach early in the film, framing it as a charming seasonal curiosity for the guests. It is, in fact, her countdown. The deadline explains her behavior throughout the weekend, including her urgency to keep everyone at the property.

How the Families Defeat Andras

The families break Andras’s hold by doing what the demon cannot process: all of them simultaneously offering themselves as willing hosts. Rohan’s offer to serve as a younger, healthier vessel, made as an attempt to free Frank, prompts Andras to leave Frank’s body. But Josh refuses to follow through on killing Rohan, the step the original plan required, and instead recites the summoning incantation himself. Cliff, Liddy, Sharon, and Sara (Vivian Bang) each join in. Confronted with too many willing bodies at once, the demon cannot resolve which body to enter. Andras loses coherence, assumes a corporeal form outside any human host, and Frank steps on the demon’s throat.

A demonology book found at the property gave the group context on what they faced.

Brenda, who had spent more than forty years preparing to fulfill her obligation, is left with nothing. Rohan’s proposal goes ahead. Josh accepts.

The question the film answers is not why Andras chose these families but why Brenda’s trap caught them: the wrong rental at the wrong time of year, a Wi-Fi password that doubled as a demonic incantation, and a family conflict that kept the atmosphere hostile long enough for the Worm Moon to arrive. The demon was already there. The families provided the conditions it needed to act.