Absolute Perfection

Rating: 10/10 (12 August 2018)

Along with The Cabin in the Woods, It Follows, and perhaps also the first Insidious (2010...counting it), The Witch is EASILY, EASILY one of the greatest and most original horror movies of the current decade.
The filmmakers went further than anyone has before in authentically recreating the time period and place, very early colonial New England, and the language the characters use may be initially off-putting but do what I did, turn subtitles on and make an effort to try to appreciate real historical accuracy that took a lot of effort in the face of being unpopular. If you are honest with yourself, you'll admit that you are following what's going on just fine and the realism is what sells the film. It gives more credit to the depiction of the "true" stories that were used to inspire the film.
There is just the right amount of....witchery.... to be completely terrifying and seem as though it really could be something that really did happen. Any more focus away from a more "normal" setting, any more footage of witchcraft would have taken away from the power of what we ARE shown.
Yes, it is a supernatural based horror film, but its dedication to historical accuracy makes it come off feeling so real, so possible, so plausible, and if you give yourself over to it, it becomes absolutely believable, as well as giving us today a better understanding of just how horrifying witchcraft was to people of that era, almost to the point of understanding why the witch trials of early America took such a hold over people, people who didn't have beliefs more rooted in science and reason. Witches were accepted as fact and if you submit to the movie and suspend that disbelief, you'll see how terrified those people might have been when coming face to face with what they believed to be credible stories of witches and witchcraft.
And if it just did happen to be real, witchcraft I mean, this is the indisputably most accurate depiction of real witches.

So glad to have been alive at a time like this and to have watched it.
Harm None
3x3x3