I don't want to give too much away about Take Shelter, because maybe the thing I liked best about it was not knowing anything about it going in and watching it unfold. But there are essentially two endings, one after the other, and the second one is either a stupid, clumsy attempt to get back into the characters' heads in an abstract way, or it completely sells out the movie that came before it and turns the whole thing into a steaming pile.
If the movie had ended five minutes earlier, I'd have given it 8.5/10. As it is, I would probably knock it all the way down to 6/10.
Spoilerfic discussion of ending:
I think the two most likely meanings the filmmaker had in mind for the ending are:
1) This was yet another dream by Curtis, but this time, significantly, his wife features in the dream as someone he trusts who trusts him, instead of another person who is out to get him. It's an expression of how--though he still has schizophrenia to deal with--he still has his wife totally behind him, and that means everything. If they'd shot this in a way that made it a little clearer this was a dream, I'd have felt it was a more worthwhile ending. Leaving it ambiguous like it is may sound cool, but if viewers are unsure if the filmmaker meant one thing or the exact total fucking opposite, how successful a film is it, really?
or
2) It doesn't matter if it's a dream or not. His wife is behind him now. Lovely and all, but he's a mad prophet but his wife is behind him or he's a paranoid schizophrenic and his wife is behind him? Either of these is okay? Bullshit.
So many people are reading the final scene as literal and I think that either a) the filmmaker means the exact opposite, so this is a fail; or b) he's willing to undercut the entire movie to stir up some discussion, even if it means he has no real statement of any kind that he's willing to stand behind. Either of those sucks.
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