predictable and pointless

Rating: 2/10 (25 September 2019)

The ending credits of this movie cite folklore as the inspiration for what you have just seen, but that is a poor excuse for what the producers subjected the audience to.
THE VVITCH is set in 17th century New England, and what the producers got right were two things: The language (Old English, requiring concentration to follow, but historically accurate nonetheless), and great cinematography.
The story opens with a man and his family being banished from their village, seemingly for the "crime" of being openly Christian, then going through the struggle of survival living on their own, with only farming and hunting as their source of food. Their 5th child, an infant, is kidnapped and grossly murdered by a humanesque creature who is never full identified, but is implied to be Satanic in some form, and this creature proceeds to harm and divide the family.
While the screenwriters may having been attempting to draw the battle lines between good and evil, they instead seem to go out of their way to criticize Christianity, and the role of man as leader of the family, both of which were common and the way things were three centuries ago. I admittedly got a chuckle out of the depiction of the wife as completely irrational and unable to be pleased (some things never change). But this was probably not the direct intent of the movie.
To make matters worse, good dies and evil wins by the end of the movie, depressing the audience and making us wonder what we just watched and why we bothered to watch it.
Furthermore, the implied references to the evil that Satan's minions do are cheap and stereotypical, from the highly sexualized little red riding hood woman taking advantage of the helpless preteen boy, and continuing to the surviving oldest child's being freed of religious bonds and drifting away in a sea of naked spirits at the end of the movie.
This movie was hugely disappointing and insulting.