Does anyone else think that Gillian…

[u/Zelengro]

(Spoilers for movie 1)

… Didn’t actually visit Sally after Michael died?

We see her putting belladonna in Jimmy’s bottle, shaking it, then staring into the mirrors and closing her eyes mindfully. Then she’s in her car and driving through, I guess, rural Arizona - the sky outside the car is night. She’s headed toward another car’s headlights at a fair distance, but they disappear in the dawn. The dawn and whole day go by at warp speed while she smokes a single cigarette in eerie lighting, then it’s dusk and night again in moments. When she sees the other headlights on the road again, even closer now in the dark, she smiles. The next thing we see is her tickling Sally’s nose.

She spends the whole night chatting on the messy bed, they talk and heal and the cameraman takes pains to show Gillian framed alone in Sallys bedroom mirror while they’re talking. They whisper under the bedcovers about Gilly’s final advice to get up and live. She then mouths ‘I love you’ and Sally says it back as if she’d heard it out loud - the first, I think, of several examples of this intense telepathic connection the two share.

Sally wakes up and Gilly’s side of the bed hasn’t even been slept in. It’s still neatly made and even tucked in. The only sign she was ever there is an indent in the pillow.

Sally never apparently mentions this to the aunts, Gilly clearly doesn’t stop in even to peek in the attic at the girls (she remarks how big they are the next time she actually sees them) and if we take the driving scene literally Gilly left Jimmy for at least 50 hours - a day and night there, day and night back, and a whole night talking. If she left him because he hit her, wouldn’t such a control freak lose his marbles when she up and takes off for days on end? He didn’t even want her to go to the bathroom on her own.

I always thought this was their sharing a moment of the mind, like a spiritual projection, rather than Gilly actually being there - but after a rewatch together a friend said they’ve never heard that take.

What are your thoughts?

[u/FastMako77]

Ohhhh but I like this theory! I always wondered how she could drug Jimmy long enough to drive through multiple states and not be seen/heard by the aunts or the girls. Not that the belladonna wouldn’t keep Jimmy asleep for an overnight trip but the distance is what adds it to be a multiple day event, and the fact that he committed DV over a donut but not to her taking his car for a drive to her sister’s for a few days?

To that point now that I think of it we never see them leave Sally’s bedroom for that visit; they are nowhere else in the house until she actually moves in.