Intriguing but fatally flawed

Rating: 5/10 (12 November 2017)

I found this film very interesting if viewed as a psychological thriller rather than a horror film about witches, even though the director is reported to have said he meant it to be interpreted literally. I imagined somebody from the plantation finding the scene of horror at the family farm, the missing children, or perhaps even finding Thomasin raving in the woods, and explaining it in the only way that would have made sense to simple 17th century peasants. It was easy to understand that the family, alone in an unfamiliar and scary wilderness, could have terrified each other into believing anything, compounded by extreme hunger, which would have led them to try eating any plants they could find, including psychotropic mushrooms, as well as the ergot which is overtly shown on the failed maize crop. For me, that is why the scene at the witch's hut with the stolen baby was disappointing. Imposing the third person narrative viewpoint made it too obvious that this was supposed to be taken literally and couldn't be read as the hallucinogenic ravings of insane minds - unlike all the other diabolic appearances in the film.
However, the real big flaw in this movie which has made me reduce my rating drastically from the 9 it would otherwise have received was the appalling diction of the actors, which made the dialogue almost inaudible in places. Perhaps the younger cast members have not been taught how to project their voices to allow the whole audience to hear what they have to say, but I have seen Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie in other things so I know they are perfectly capable of making themselves understood, so it must have been a directorial decision to get them to mumble their lines so they were barely comprehensible.
What a terrible decision that was. What a pity as well, when obviously such a lot of effort went into making the dialogue sound as authentically seventeenth century as possible. What is so great about this trendy habit of directors to not want the audience to be able to hear what the characters have to say? Are they embarrassed by the weakness of the script? Or do they think it adds some kind of bogus authenticity to the story or the characters? Whatever, it is really annoying.
In the case of this film, it was only after I read a synopsis on Wikipedia afterwards that I found that I had missed some crucial plot elements, such as that Black Philip talked to the twins, or that Thomasin was to be sent away to live elsewhere, because I simply could not understand the dialogue.
Ironically, I watched this straight after seeing I, Daniel Blake and the contrast was stark. Every word of that movie was clear to understand, despite the fact that most of the characters spoke in broad geordie accents. For that matter, I don't recall ever seeing a Coen Bros movie where they had to resort to this "mumble your words to make your character seem interesting" style of directing.