Read the original on Letterbox'd
Is this part of the Good For Her Cinematic Universe? I have no idea. It's hard to say whether this is some good end for Thomasin or not. Her family was absolutely horrible to her, but vvitches in this universe certainly do seem to actually murder babies and bathe in their blood and bewitch children. Although Mercy and Jonas were horrible little brats.
This isn't quite as uncertain seeming as The Lighthouse, with its jarring cuts and strange ending. For much of it I did still wonder whether or not there even was a witch or if it was all just madness. A lot of it certainly seemed like hysteria. But on the whole this was more certain than the Lighthouse, and that ending doesn't leave room for ambiguity unless you read into it as "well she's just crazy now and hallucinating".
Most of this was extremely unsettling, though. I didn't notice it until halfway through, but there are so many shots that just sort of end on a hanging moment. They leave you wondering what happened, what was the resolution. When Katherine climbed into the grave with Caleb, what happened? When the children saw the vvitch, what happened? When Caleb was taken by the vvitch, what happened? So many moments hang, letting the tension build until long minutes later when they might get a resolution. It's so fucking unnerving.
This is firmly a horror movie, but most of it is just tension. And even though I don't think the ending was a hallucination, there is so much left uncertain. Did the vvitches curse the land or did God? Did God find the family sinful and poison the crops because of William's pride? I don't know, but I do know that Christianity is fucked up.
And the thing is, I have no real context for it. I know of Christianity in the abstract, but I haven't been to a church (A Presbyterian one at that, so very different from these Puritan types descended from Calvinists) in over two decades. Throughout most of this until the end, William is a fairly reasonable person and one of the least offensive of the family towards Thomasin (aside from Caleb, who is clearly horny for her). But his words to Caleb about how everyone is born as sinners is hard to ignore. He's calm and gentle but he's also a liar who let Thomasin take the blame. If anything Katherine comes off as more one to use religion to harm. But telling your children that they're born in sin and doomed to Hell unless God takes a shine to them is absolutely fucked. I could see how "we're all sinners but God cares about us all anyway" could be appealing, but it just feels like such a perverse worldview. And I don't even know if William and his pride opposed the church of the plantation because they were worse or more liberal than he is! That's the thing, for all I know he could have packed his family up and taken exile because the rest of the village were worse! That's kind of terrifying!
The entire movie has hanging over it the feeling that I get as a queer person any time I see a cross necklace or hear someone say something religious. Will that person be delusional and willing to kill their children as Abraham would have done had God not stayed his hand? I don't know. And at every moment I didn't know whether William, and certainly Kate, would do something wicked like strike Thomasin or something. Honestly I half kept expecting Will to rape Thomasin. I don't know how much of that is just the framing and tension that needed to be snapped or how much is just my assumptions about those type of folk.
Did the little brats actually talk to Satan? Or was Black Phillip just conveniently also possibly maybe Satan and they liked the goat? I don't know. There clearly were vvitches, but everything else is uncertain and tense. It felt like a rubber band that was taught, despite simply lying on the table.