Weird, Creepy, Unique, Disturbing

Rating: 3/10 (27 February 2016)

Weird. This movie was definitely weird, and that in itself is not necessarily bad. Weird can be okay. I found this movie to be weird, unique, disturbing, interesting, and creepy. Not scary, more creepy. The good parts about this movie was the scenery, the acting, the uniqueness (no clichÃ©s in *this* film), and the time period (mid 1600's). The absolute worst part of this film was that I couldn't understand most of it. I didn't understand most (and that means over 50%) of the sentences. I wanted subtitles. I'm reading from others that the dialogue was a wee bit hard to understand. Ya' THINK? That's kind of like saying a cannon fired on a ship gives a few splinters. Anyway, I understood about 20% of the dialogue. The second worst thing was that it didn't tie things together. SPOILER ALERT (kind of): I waited for the end to tell me who the witch really was, what did she do, was the teenage girl insane (that would have been a better ending in my opinion), why did the mother hallucinate, was anyone really evil, what happened to Caleb in the cave, what happened to the twins, etc. etc. The third worst element was the over dramatized scenes for effect -- he gets gutted, she gets strangled, he upchucks a bloody apple, she gets the knife, he gets shot in the eye (but later, no blood!), she gets hen-pecked, the boy has a 1950 haircut... my WORD! And the ending was just silly to me. A talking goat? At that point, I wondered if the film was realistic and someone lost their mind. Nope. Sheer silly fantasy. This may be my failing in that I was expecting realism from a fantastical film. But the dark mood, the cinematography, and the imagery haunted me. The acting was superb. Also, the paranoia, suspicion, and mistrust that existed in a family who loved each other was done well.