As discussed on a post about another movie. Where is God?

I already wrote that it cannot be the second interpretation, but the movie has many elements thrown in which point in that direction anyway, such as the absurdly extreme fanaticism in the mother's actions as the story progress, she does indeed seem very obviously insane at some point. Also the wheat does look like it has an ergot attack. I didn't even notice this during the movie, I considered hunger and imminent death to be the reason why they fell apart, but I rewatched the bits because someone mentioned it, and it sure looks like it has ergot - which just seems unlikely to be happenstance. But who knows, maybe it is?

It is a fact in the movie that their harvest failed, they already starve and that they will die of hunger, unless they return to the town where they were thrown out by other puritans, supposedly because the family were too fanatical in their religiousness. They choose to stay, which means they choose death rather than humiliation, and this was completely independently of the concurrent witches story. Now you may think that it was all the witches fault or the fault of the devil, and maybe that's how it's supposed to be, but it's actually not a fact in the movie.

Just because they contradict what happens on screen doesn't eliminate the elements he put there, it just makes them literally impossible, but they're still there. It's like a two layered story. It's clearly based on an interpretation, but it's not based on Zero indication, as you write, it's just you who do not see it, because you eliminate the possibility based on the fact that we see the witches, which we indeed do.

Kuku, I do agree, that's exactly how the movie is, in the beginning it's their increasing fanaticism which causes all their problems, including being thrown out of their community, but in the end it turn out it was indeed the devil all along, and that the mother was right and the daughter is indeed a witch. But in the first part, if we ignore the weird witches imagery, there's a lot of strong indication that it's all their own fault, and that the mother is the main cause because she interpret everything that happens as a punishment from god, due to a perceived lack of pure faith, so they don't do anything about their misery. I wrote something like what you wrote in another thread here, it's how I see it too.

However. - that's just the story as it is, the author still does show the family as an insane bunch of fanatics who cannot get anything done because they expect God to help them directly, which does not happen no matter how pious they are or how much they pray, they still suffer and eventually perish, because even if the devil wasn't in the movie, and no witch was there, the family is still doomed due to a failed harvest and unwillingness to accept the defeat and return to the village and ask forgiveness. All that does not disappear from the story just because it turns out the devil and the witches are real in the movie.

Ps. finally, I recommend looking at pictures of ergot on wheat, it looks exactly like the spoiled crops the father looks at, at some point in the movie. After someone mentioned it I actually looked up how it looked and compared it and there's no doubt in my mind, the director meant it to be ergot, because it looks just like ergot. I wasn't aware of how it looked, so I didn't notice it initially, but it is obviously meant to be ergot.

Now, I still consider the story a supernatural horror, based on the overall movie, but it does have a lot of things thrown into the movie that suggests otherwise.