Maybe it's because most of the media I've been consuming lately is direct meta commentary on the relationship a viewer has with a fictional reality, maybe I'm just accustomed at this point to thinking of humanity as eldritch.....
But my first thought when they said "a God looks through a pinhole and makes sense of what it sees, and that becomes reality" (something like that anyway, I only watched the movie yesterday and have a pretty bad memory) was that it's a metaphor for the audience. And I don't mean that it's just that, it's something very meaningful from an in-universe perspective that is too powerful and beyond humans to really be explained. I think that the movie is an incredible portrayal of an existentially horrifying apocalyptic scenario, and I think that it's also... a pinhole.
The camera in the submarine is a pinhole into the blood ocean of AT-5. The window at the front of the submarine is a pinhole into the C.O.I. space station. The speaker is a pinhole, which allows Simon to hear only a little of what is happening at the C.O.I., and only allows him to communicate a little of what is happening to him. The recordings are pinholes into the lives of the previous convict and the pilots of the SM-8. The flickers of Simon's memories are a pinhole, which give us the barest glimpse of who he was before he was welded into the SM13. Simon is a pinhole, the audience is limited to his perception alone, with little distinction between reality and what might be hallucination brought on by heat exhaustion, concussion, radiation poisoning, drinking isopropyl alcohol, or whatever sort of bloody cosmic madness. Simon's own experiences are a singular pinhole into his world, he does not know everything. All of the people in this world are looking through their own pinholes. The movie is a pinhole into the world of Iron Lung, and on the other side is us. Making sense of what we see.
In the scene where a robotic voice relays a message repeatedly until Simon freaks out and breaks it, at first I couldn't tell what it was saying. At first, I thought it was saying "over again." Then, I figured it was probably saying "hull damaged." I asked my friend who watched the movie with me, and he thought that it was saying "I'll break you." Throughout the entire movie there were moments where it was difficult to tell what exactly Ava or David or the woman from the SM-8 were saying, especially when those things were heavily distorted or layered on top of each other, I had to pick and choose what to pay attention to and try to figure out from a small collection of words that I could make out what was happening. And that was on purpose, we're not supposed to be able to make out everything. We make sense of what we can see, what we think we can see.
A very important part of cosmic horror is the unknown, whatever caused The Quiet Rapture can never be explained, or it loses what makes it terrifying. It's the numerous possibilities and impossibilities that make it chilling, it's the things you can't understand that make you feel small, which is why I do not think that the audience's interpretation literally physically dictates what happened in the universe of the movie. But I think that what the audience sees through the pinhole and what they think it is beyond those things, what they believe, does create something, and that's on purpose. I think that what the people of this world see through their pinhole perspectives of this enormous disaster matters. It matters that what some see as corpses, Eden sees as soil. It matters that when Simon as a child sees the light of the vanished stars, to him they are stars. Maybe this movie is in a way about how everything sees through a pinhole, and makes sense of what it sees. And that becomes their world. That becomes reality.
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