It is so hard to make a halfway decent horror film, let alone a horror film that isn't absolute garbage. there's a reason for this. Studios want horror films to have low-risk budget, which means they very rarely have bankable stars, talented writers, or skilled directors behind the project. When a rare horror movie actually is scary and achieves its goal, it is played up to drum up audiences to be scared.
The Witch is one of those movies, but I have to be honest and criticize the studio and the marketing for the project. Playing up this movie as a supernatural horror movie that was going to scare the pants off of audiences was the wrong choice. Adding a quote by Stephen King, the king of horror, saying that he thought the novel was scary was a predictable and poor choice. it seems that every above average movie now has an attached Stephen King quote. So going in, my perception of the movie was already skewed, so when the movie was something entirely different than what the trailers presented, I was incredibly let down initially.
Now that we have all that out of the way, and I look past the marketing, I realize that The Witch is a very well done psychological thriller. Placed in the barren woods, The movie follows a 1600s family that was cast out of their New England colony for being heathens. Starting their own life in the woods, the begin to suspect that there is a devil worshiper among them, as things begin to go wrong for their family. Completely putting this family in an isolated and barren setting, writer/director Robert Eggers does an impeccable job leaving the family to be slowly and excruciatingly picked apart slowly. Eggers also lets their minds betray them in an ultimate game of supernatural Who Done It? However, I think the ending and the forces could have been explained a little further, and the open ended way the film concluded really left more questions than it did answers. Overall, The Witch is a poorly-marketed, above-average thriller that is overall very solid, but could have been an absolute masterpiece.
Grade:7.5/10
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