[MRM]

Steve and Shaun, let me take a stab at getting at what the movie is about. I recently took a course on writing in the humanities and it taught me a lot about how to interpret and understand ambiguous literature like this. I'm much more used to reading and writing where there is a black and white, right or wrong, answer to everything. So, much like reading a Tabs thread, you need to expand your interpretation to be more abstract thinking.

The key is that the narrator, in this case the little girl who is the main character, is an unreliable narrator. The viewer is put in a quandary. Do you believe that the character's perceptions are reported accurately and reflect reality? If you do, then you're called to believe that something supernatural is at work. If you don't believe there is a supernatural explanation, then the girl's perception, or her reporting of her perception is faulty. You, as the reader or viewer don't know what to believe, because you have no frame of reference. All you know is that the main character's thoughts and perceptions are real to her and she is reporting them as she believes she experiences them. The main character can't make sense of her own situation and is trying to find explanations for her own seemingly inexplicable experiences. The main character may be so traumatized by something in her past that she is subconsciously misinterpreting events as a coping device.

It's up to the viewer to decide for himself what is real, imagined, and whether the girls has accurately analyzed her own situation, and if not, why not, and what is the real truth of the situation. The movie is then intended to be a metaphor for something larger, that the viewer has to figure out for himself.