My take on what was really going on ***SPOLIERS***

EDIT: I know I wrote a bit of a novelette here, so I added a TL;DR at the bottom if you want to skip to that.

I posted this in response on another thread, but just wanted to repeat this in case anyone wouldn't see it there. I have to admit, I *hate* it when people add all these wild plot elements to a film making it more complicated than it should be, but there were so many little unexplained parts to this film, little hints and unexplained behaviors by the both the husband and the wife that really were suggesting there was more going on than meets the eye. When I first came up with this I was even thinking myself that it was a stretch, but I watched the film for a second time and doing that really convinced me that I might be on to something, it seems to fill in all the blanks. So keep an open mind reading this because it will really sound like I'm overreaching until you re-watch the film with this scenario in mind.

People that think that the dad was molesting either one or both of the kids are on to something, but they have picked entirely the wrong parent. The dad saw the kids leaving in the morning, he was watching them walk away through the window; what possible reason could he have for not just holding the information back from the police, but from his own wife; he was protecting the wife from the truth of what she had been doing to Lilly, abusing her. The mother is the one who molested Lilly, *not* the father. The dad was trying to protect his children and his wife, as he had finally figured out what has been going on, or perhaps he received that revelation when all the stuff with the school teacher went down prior to them moving to the new town. In either case, he was protecting his wife about the truth of what she been doing, but possibly had no recollection of.

And the wife was clearly had some very deep issues and showed all the signs of a sexual predator; her behaviour went waaayyy beyond a manifestation of sexual frustration, including the way she initiated sex with her husband. There are plenty of sexually frustrated woman that don't throw themselves at young boys and police officers, the whole concept of consent was completely foreign to her... that's pathology in action. Maybe it's harder for us to see that because we don't think of women as sexual predators and molesters, but there are many, many out there.

The father went to the teacher's house, and the aboriginal boy's house *desperately* wanting to find Lily there because he didn't want to accept what he had been *desperately* trying to deny what was going on in his own household, with either him finally facing the truth for the first time, or that he thought or hoped the abuse had stopped. He knew all the places where Tom had been wandering off to, he had the places marked off on a map even!, so this was a common thing. The wife also was lying to the cop about Tom's wanderings, it was the father that interjected and said it was much more common that his wife was saying and he wandered much further than the wife wanted to admit to the cop herself. She was covering something up, and there's only one thing that she would be covering up that makes any sense.

When the cop accused the husband of molestation he was genuinely disgusted and offended at the very thought that he would do something like that; his reaction was defensive, but not for himself... he was protecting his wife. Remember the one phrase from the girl's diary about the touching in the dark, "you touching me", that part. It was haunting the wife, to the point that she couldn't get it out of her head. She may have been what's referred to as "splitting" in psychology, she may have had no recollection of what she had done to her daughter, and possibly son, but with the consequence of what happened to her daughter **because** of her abusing her, the promiscuity, the disappearance, she couldn't escape the truth of the matter anymore no matter how hard she was trying to suppress it. Speaking of the diary, think of the vitriol that the daughter displayed toward the mother... if that doesn't suggest that the mother was the source of the abuse as well, I'm not sure what more evidence someone would need.

And that was the moment where she had a complete disassociative/psychotic break right before she did her Lady Godiva impersonation down Main Street, subconsciously, or perhaps even consciously if she finally admitted to herself what she had been doing, wanting to feel the shame that her act would bring in place of the shame she should have been feeling all along because of the abuse she was committing.

Think also of the scene where the husband said that Lily certainly didn't take after him. That had nothing to do with any promiscuity on his wife's part, that was after he finally realized what had been happening under his own roof, or perhaps already knew, but was trying to get his wife to admit it to herself. Whether he had just figured it out, was in partial denial, or that he had figured it out when the whole teacher-Lily sex thing exploded in their former town, that conversation was totally about his resentment of his wife for what she had done, and also trying to get her to admit what she had done. Abusers of children, especially ones that are acting our their own past abuse that could have happened to them when they were children, sometimes block out their own behavior. This isn't an unknown thing that happens, though it is rare, it isn't unheard of.

So many of the strange behaviours of both the father and the mother that were a little inexplicable, if you re-watch the movie with my scenario of what was going on under the surface, *all* those behaviors will make perfect sense. Think about how the son reacted to the mother, with fear and distrust. And think about how much more he trusted the father... the son waited until the mother had left the room even to tell the dad about Lily getting picked up. He was terrified of his mother. And think about the mother looking at herself in the mirror, putting on Lily's makeup, putting on her clothes, and obviously getting sexually aroused. If the father had, say, gone into Lily's room and started smelling or fondling her crop top to his obvious arousal... just how would the audience react to that in relation to the likelihood that he had been carrying on an inappropriate relationship with her, if even just in his own mind? Yet the mother did exactly that, and the audience doesn't connect the dots.

And above all else, remember the conversation between the wife and the older aboriginal woman... go to that part again, listen very carefully to what the old woman says to the wife, to the exact words she used. Somehow the old woman, I think the implication is through some sort of supernatural means, she knew what the woman had done, knew the denial she was in, her "splitting", and that she knew she couldn't help the woman because she was beyond any help. The wife knowing the truth of her actions would have destroyed her psychologically, and it wouldn't bring Lily back. *That* is what the old woman was talking about, not that she wasn't able to help in finding the daughter, but that she couldn't *help* the wife.

I know this seems far-fetched, and that I'm inserting plot elements out of nowhere, but seriously, watch the film again keeping this scenario in mind, that's what I did, and so, so many subtle things will pop out at you, so many behaviours of the husband, wife, and son, as well as those diary entries, and the strange one that haunted the wife so much, I think if you do that you might find that my scenario isn't quite as off-the-wall as it might seem at first glance.

TL;DR:

The mom had been molesting Lily since she was 5 until the time of the incident with the teacher when Lily was 15. It seems that she may have turned her nocturnal attentions toward Tom since the pressures she was experiencing in the new town they moved to. The mom had been either been experiencing psychological splitting, or was perhaps experiencing dissassociative breaks or fugue states when the molestation occurred, in either case, she didn't remember what she had done, though it was bubbling to the surface throughout the film up until her psychotic/dissassociative break before the incident on main street.

The father either didn't know this was occurring, or knew it had occurred in the past before the affair with the teacher, but had now realized that the wife was still at it, either with Lily again, or with Tom. This explains the otherwise inexplicable, that he didn't tell either his wife or the police that he had witnessed the kids walking away through the kitchen windows as he was having his morning coffee, and why he was doing all-night secret searches for the kids on his own, checking all of Tom's usual haunts on the special map he had marked off; he was protecting his wife from the truth of her actions because he knew it would psychologically destroy her.