Pointless and not very successful exercise in mood

Rating: 4/10 (20 February 2016)

I was highly disappointed by The Witch. I just don't understand why independent horror films keep failing to scare me these days. The closest anything has come to scaring me in recent years is perhaps Babadook and Goodnight Mommy, but even those fell a little short of their potential.
In this one we have a handful of creepy scenes that are completely wasted, because this film so lacks anything resembling a plot that that's all they come across as, just random scenes.
OK, here we go, I'll try to explain it (spoiler warning). A family is for some reason exiled from an early 17th century New England town, so they go off and find a spot to live on their own, but they don't seem to know how to grow or hunt for food. The family isn't properly introduced to us in the first place, so it's a little confusing (is there one or two families living together) but soon we figure out it's just one family with a lot of kids. They all talk like Shakespearean characters so it's hard to identify with them. One day the little baby vanishes in thin air and apparently there's some old witch living out in the woods who took him and I guess, ate him or something. From then on nothing is explained. The witch does make another appearance, but she's just a flash and she never becomes a character in this story, is never explained whatsoever. The older boy disappears in the woods and when he returns he's possessed, I guess, or maybe he's just sick and delusional. I don't know. The older daughter and the younger set of twins then start accusing each other of being witches because their goat gives blood instead of milk, while the mother thinks she's breast feeding her baby when really a crow is pecking on her. The father chops a lot of wood in at least four or five scenes of him chopping wood. Their goat then becomes murderous and everyone goes nuts and the girl discovers that the goat is Lucifer himself, I guess, and he tempts the girl to sign her name in his book and she goes off into the woods to float around in the sky with the other witches.
The end.