Was it good or bad? The easiest reading is that Curtis was right all along, a sort of Cassandra of southern Ohio. His seeming schizophrenia was nothing more than the outward manifestation of a gift for foresight, one that proves ultimately vindicated when The End arrives. And though that reading is undeniable to a certain extent - clearly the filmmakers are making us see just that possibility - it both too obviously contradicts the truth of his paranoia and the facts of the film as they have been presented to us. The key, I think, is in a few things. First: Samantha and the look Jessica Chastain gives her lovely, resolute face when she speaks the film’s final words, faced with the onrushing apocalypse: “Okay.” Her tone is calm, disciplined, and eminently practical, the admonition of a competent, realistic woman to do what needs to be done. To me, her expression recalls almost exactly her tone in the scene where she confronted Curtis in the yard, accepting his mental illness and explaining in clear, measured steps what they would do to get through this crisis: “I’m going to get a job. You’re going to find a new job. We won’t go to the beach this year.” When faced with her husband’s mental illness, or the end of the world, it makes no difference. To this family, to this woman (and this is no less her film than his) those two are the same, and the final scene shows us that. The other key comes in a pair of earlier scenes: the extraordinary scene in the tornado shelter (“this is what it means to stay with us”) and the quietly crushing scene with the professional psychiatrist (“are you saying I have to leave my family?”). This second scene is the cruel abandoning of the promise underwriting the film, a promise made explicit by Samantha in the storm shelter: if he confronts his demons, he will be rewarded. This is the implicit assumption underwriting his actions and our investment in them. If he had no chance of getting better, each downward step wouldn’t hurt as much as it does. Because this is a promise to us as well as to Curtis - we want to be rewarded for the time we have put into him - the film cannot end with its abandonment, and Curtis being institutionalized. To do so would have been profoundly unsatisfying. And perhaps this is the most realistic option; but because it is a film, a work of subjective fiction, we get to partake the heady rush of the “what if.” This final scene is our and Curtis’ release, our moment of complete fantasy that makes our dreams come true, one we get to have here because the real world won’t allow it. It is an act of imagination as kindness. At least for a moment, Curtis is vindicated. And then, there’s always the chance that Curtis was right.