Autistic Family Drama with Horror Elements

Rating: 4/10 (12 March 2016)

Just saw this at the theater. I think it is worth seeing because I just plain believed the drama playing out on screen. This is because the acting was very good. It looked beautiful (of course). And the writing was believable.
Basically there's a family patriarch in colonial America who pulls up stakes at his village and tries to resettle out in the wilderness over some kind of moral/religious disagreement with the town elders. The strain of living off the land all on their own, then, is naturally no good for the friction in the family. To top it off, their isolation makes them vulnerable to a coven of witches in the forest nearby who kidnap, murder, and/or craftily turn them on one another.
I'll get the flaws out of the way: the movie has an annoying, pretentious habit of lingering on certain shots for WAY too long. Yes the acting and writing is really good, I really do feel like I'm in the 1600s with this family to whom religion is the center of existence. But the camera freakin lingers on the boy Caleb getting a bandage around his chest for what feels like half an hour... On an agonizingly slow pan up to the treetops of the forest while loud and dissonant music brays like a wounded jackass... It distracts from the narrative and almost feels like a film student who's smitten with his own brilliance.
Also Caleb's death scene was really stupid and drawn out. It clubbed me over the head with "CRAZY POSSESSED CHILD HIJINX" so hard that I almost got a concussion. There's a strange feeling I got that the movie, like, makes you expect something cool to happen (like, I dunno, the mutation scenes in John Carpenter's "The Thing"), but they never do... We just get actors acting crazy and fake blood and loud music. Kinda like a hamburger without the patty.
One exception was a scene involving a crow and a bloody boob. That was clever and a little creepy.
But still, the movie is interesting because it somehow rings true. It said it was based on true accounts of witches, and I believe it. Witches are not nice. They do not mean well. They are monsters who hate everything good, and Christianity is the only thing that really challenges them. There may have been a few good reasons behind the witch hunts.