Greatly helped by subtitles, Best Horror Movie of 2015

Rating: 10/10 (11 April 2019)

This would make a perfect companion-piece to Arthur Miller's The Crucible. The classic American play suggests the only witches were in the minds of the participants; this one, let's just say, goes in a different direction. Subtitles allow us to hear the hushed Elizabethan conversations - a real weakness in the theatrical showings was that you couldn't hear most of the dialogue. This is a bone-chilling analysis of an outcast Puritan family and their gradual destruction by, yes, witches. A major breakthrough in the horror genre, it would take a couple of more years before Hereditary came along to give us another.