The New England Folktale

Rating: 8/10 (10 January 2020)

I'm not gonna lie, I decided to watch this movie because of Robert Eggers new release "The Lighthouse" which I really enjoyed. I'm not particularly fond of horrors (or lobsters) and the last one I actually enjoyed was "A Quiet Place".
After watching "The Witch" I had a scroll through other people reviews, and one thing that struck me was that a whole lot of one star comments came from people where "The Witch" is their only written review to date. With a lot of horrific movies out there, this movie defied their expectations so hard that they wrote this one and only review, that's pretty telling!
Main reason to review it badly was that "It wasn't scary". In my opinion the trailer for "The Witch" is at fault in this case, the movie is described here as: "One of the most genuinely unnerving horror film in recent memory" David Ehrlich or "A nightmarish picture that will make your blood run cold" Rodrigo Perez, accompanied by the "scariest" images taken from the movie and dramatic score, sadly trailer did this movie a big disfavor.
Meanwhile on the poster we can only read "The New England Folktale. Evil takes many forms" well that's more like it!
To get things straight, "The Witch" It is not a horror movie, although it contains many elements of good horrors like the sense of dread, despair, distrust, confusion or doom. But never are those emotions played to please the audiences need to be scared. It is rather the contrary, where the movie dissects and tries to explain where all those emotions may come from, meandering at the same time between reality and fable-tale, challenging you to answer what is true, and what really disturbs you as a viewer. If you approach "The Witch" like this you shouldn't walk away dissapointed, but if you are looking for jump-scares and visceral images look somewhere else.