Best movie of this type since 'The Orphanage'

***Spoilers***

I love ghost stories that are really studies in melancholy, and this one has a lineage going back through "The Haunting" to "The Spiral Staircase". I've enjoyed the various postings that either revile the ending as vague and unclear or those that find it sweetly redemptive. It's telling that movies have conditioned people to expect them wrapped up neatly with a bow (and they all lived happily ever after). It's also telling that when faced with an ambiguous ending most people, whether they think he lived or died, interpret the denouement as spritually uplifting (and they all lived happily ever after, in this world or the next). My interpretation is that of a chronic depressive. Yes, the garden was sunlit and pretty, but I saw only shame and regret on the face of the mother. She didn't look him in the eye, but rather looked askance. He moved hesitantly toward his mother, with no joy or forgiveness in his face. They don't embrace. Her turning his head to the closet to release him from it was releasing him from the emotional prison that was his life. He's joined her to walk that cursed house for eternity. I felt the ending was the visual equivalent of the narration at the end of "The Haunting": "Silence lies steadily against the wood and stone walls, and we who walk here...walk alone."