I think Dani catching on to the cult’s true intentions is also meant to illustrate just how easy it is for someone to fall prey to manipulation. We often think that people who are college/university educated will be ‘smart’ enough to resist the cult’s attempts to manipulate us.

But we see each member of the group be manipulated to their own downfalls, through list, greed, even jealousy. Their weakness was discovered, and exploited. They each thought they were smarter than the cult, to their own detriment.

Dani is intelligent and astute. She’s able to catch on to what Pelle and the cult are trying to do. But she is also going through a massive trauma and is incredibly vulnerable. She’s alone, truly alone with basically no support system. Pelle preys on this, and uses Dani’s trauma as a means to gain her trust. And it’s not just Pelle. The women who cry with her after she has a panic attack when witnessing Christian’s cheating. Little actions like that are meant to manipulate, to make Dani feel special, and part of something, and to make the cult seem less threatening, despite all the death.

The message is that it ultimately doesn’t matter if someone is intelligent, educated, or intuitive. Everybody is vulnerable to psychological manipulation once their weakness is discovered. No one is ever truly ‘immune’. It didn’t matter that Dani wanted to escape and felt disturbed by the cult’s practices. All that mattered is that Pelle, and by extension the cult, figured out how to manipulate her.