I watched it recently again and I loved it. The first time I watched it, I took the story as surface level, and I agreed with the reviews that say it’s not great but it’s watchable. The kind of basic horror you just about forget after watching, I sure did. When I re-watched, I started to remember it a bit and checked the reviews, to decide if I did like it enough to watch again, and there I read the magic words which changed my perspective completely. Now I think it’s a great movie, really something scary.

I’m just a bit confused about the ending, or rather, I would like to hear other peoples take on it.

So I think the movie is a lot better if you see it as a movie about Capgras delusion, not as a changeling story. They even say it in the movie without saying the name (the crazy neighbours husband). There’s the mothers recent brain injury, creepy stuff happening only in her point of view. I think people asking about the boys father is a red herring of domestic violence, I mean, the violence might’ve been there but the reason people ask is because she is acting strange, they’re worried about the boy. The neighbours husbands reaction to the camera still stands - you’re not supposed to argue with the delusion. The boy isn’t even that creepy when you watch it with this in mind - he’s just scared and a bit bratty because his mom acts weird, they’ve just moved to a new place etc. The song at the end, how did I miss that?

I think that at around one hour mark she just went to fully delusional. She gave her sleeping pills to the boy, tried to kill herself with burying her head but came to, dragged the boy in the basement. I think there was a moment when lights didn’t flicker and the reality showed, the boy just laid there, propably dead. Then the rest is pretty much just delusions and coming to face the fact that she was the attacker, and I think she propably burned the house and was hospitalized and the very end is just to gather other threads of plot so that the movie works on surface level changeling story too. Or maybe she didn’t get caught but continues life and hallucinates the boy?

What do you think? How do you interpret it? And is this movie just really good or am I dumb not to have gotten it the first viewing? Can anyone point me to the direction of similarly deep stories?