Perhaps the Best Horror Film of the Decade

Rating: 10/10 (9 October 2019)

It's between this film and "Hereditary"; the two horror films that I consider to be the best of the decade. What makes "The Witch" such a powerful horror film? In my opinion, it's that the scariest thing to happen in the whole of the film happens in the last few minutes, leaving the viewer with a shocking image that has such dark and grim meaning behind it, that it's nigh impossible not to be shaken and disturbed. I remember the first time I saw this film I thought it was great, and then I walked out of the theater and went about my day, but that final image kept creeping into my mind, infecting the dark corners of my room as I lay waiting for sleep. The implications of those last images are truly, in every sense of the word, horrifying, but more on that later; the rest of the film does an almost perfect job of building a world that feels infringed upon by evil on all sides, creating a place of apparent solace that is still rife with corruption. "The Witch" is about the infectious, parasitic, and sumptuous powers and allures of evil, and there's nothing more horrifying than that.