A clash of conflicted ideas.

Rating: 3/10 (12 July 2019)

I finally got to watching this movie after years of hearing about it, and I ended up very disappointed. I'll try to keep this review short, but it may contain a few spoilers. Also note English is not my primary language.
To start with context, I'm not one for blockbusters, and I love slow burn movies who like to take their time in telling stories. I did not get into this expecting anything other than being along for an unsettling ride. And while I understand why people say it's "deeply disturbing and unsettling", it's mostly because of the setting and period this movie takes place in, not the plot.
This movie has no idea what it wants to be. On one hand it offers a story with supernatural elements, and with the other it tries to show you how terrible living in a witch-hunt era was. While you can make a mix of both and get something great, all I found here were conflicting ideas that made the plot nonsensical.
Thomasin is the eldest daughter of an exiled puritan family, with who we're supposed to relate to and feel bad for. Her family constantly blames her for everything bad that happens to them while it's never really her fault, and it gets to a point where they think she's a witch. Of course, this tears the family apart in a bloody fashion. Here's my main issue with this movie: if The VVitch was purely a period piece, I agree, it would be absolutely terrifying.
But it's not precisely for one thing: it clearly has supernatural elements to it which point towards there being an actual Witch, with actual powers, among other things. The plot of the movie is being moved along by supernatural elements (baby kidnapped in a second, eldest son possessed, evil devil goat, etc) which cannot be explained with logic. Knowing this, you expect the movie to go somewhere with it, have some kind of reveal of sorts.
That never happens. It just fixates on this family tearing itself apart for fear of witches, which do seem to exist, but then never develops on it. It's almost as if the original idea was for it to be entirely a family drama, a period piece in which you see how scary being a woman back then was for fear of accusations of witchcraft (which would have been a great horror story IMO), and then some dude in a suit came in and said "but what if we put an actual witch in it?". The big problem with this is that it changes the paranoia of witches, the whole center conflict of the plot, into an actual threat. We go from terrifying paranoid reality to science-fiction with evil demons. The family ends up being justified of being afraid of witches after all as they are shown to be real, which made me unable to sympathize with characters, especially Thomasin. Instead of rooting for her, I spent the whole movie waiting for the reveal that she (or the twins) were actually witches.
Which never comes. And when the credits rolled, I was just left with tons of unanswered questions and a big feeling of "that's it?".
All in all, it's a big pseudo-intellectual piece of great cinematography, and it is only praised by the numerous fan theories that try to fix the incredible amount of holes in its plot. "Head-canon" does not suffice to elevate this movie. I give it 3/10 just because of the directing and acting which is really good, but in my opinion the movie is not worth your time. But seeing all the 10/10 reviews online, I guess I just don't "get it".