Excellent Supernatural Psychodrama

Rating: 8/10 (18 June 2016)

I'm not sure whether or not this should be billed as a horror movie. But then again I'm not Christian and it can well be horrifying for a devout Christian. I would call it more... unsettling? Creepy? The director certainly did a great job at the setting and the mood of the story. You can clearly understand why the family was under so much psychological stress. First, they are running low on food. Then they have no one to turn to if things go wrong. They were dealing with the father's lies and hypocrisies and pride. The young son and daughter are struggling with puberty. And most importantly there are evil forces in the woods that seem hell bent on messing with them (to put it lightly).
I'm not saying they're not at fault. All of them had their own little flaws which contributed to their ultimate fates. Katherine was a bereaved and an unhappy woman because she never wanted to leave England and the plantation in the first place. She left anyway we can presume out of respect for her husband's authority, but inwardly resented the choice. She stopped trusting her daughter after Thomasin became associated with Samuel's disappearance. To her, at least, her son's disappearance can only be due to either malice or negligence on her daughter's part. It was not surprising that she eventually turned on Thomasin after the deaths of her two sons and the goring of her husband (did she ever found out the twins were missing? I forget). And then, since she has some good (but not valid) reasons to think her daughter probably has a hand in the deaths of two of her children, you can almost understand why she wanted to kill their murderer.
William was prideful and "principled" to a fault and would not swallow his dignity to allow his family to live in the relative security of the plantation. His actions exiled his family and he foolishly thought he could make it in the wilderness. And then when his wife asked him to return (they have many good reasons at this point, including the lack of food! And plus there are supernatural forces that want to, again, mess with them). He proclaims perfect religious observance and lords that over the judges in the plantation and THEN we discover that he's lied and stole from his wife to do what he thought was right, then tacitly allowed his son to lie to his wife too, and allowed Thomasin to take the blame for the theft (if only for a little while). While he seems to be a loving man, he's also a deeply flawed one. You could still see how much he loved his daughter even to the end, even if he expressed it very imperfectly.
And Thomasin, well, she's not the perfect daughter and it was clear the witches were conspiring to recruit her all along, but I can hardly blame her by the end. She was blameless for Samuel's abduction. It was not negligence in the conventional sense because she was up against a witch; there's no way she could have stopped the witch; she whisked him away without making one sound then disappeared! She was not involved in Caleb's death either, although you could see why her parents would think so. She's also linked to the twin's hysteria. Given this it's not surprising that her parents turned on her. But on the other hand she is mostly blameless through all of this, except for the cruel prank she played on Mercy in the beginning. Her turn to the devil was just a logical next step for her. She has nothing left. Her family has betrayed her and she was forced to kill her mother in self defense. She could never have made it to the plantation; even if she could there's no telling what they could have done to her. She had nowhere to turn at that point. Her final scene, her "you all think I'm evil and betrayed me so I might as well own it", was the most tragic of all.
The film is an excellent look at how terrifying living away from society can be, how nature is harsh and unforgiving, and what fear/paranoia can drive a person to do (a mother trying to kill her own daughter anyone?). You can feel their stress and their fears and you understand why they're acting jumpy and irrational. They were trying desperately to keep it together in the face of starvation and supernatural evils trying to wreck their lives, but in the end destroyed each other through paranoia and some truly astounding (but understandable) leaps in logic. The movie itself didn't scare me in the conventional sense. What was scary is that while I don't morally support any of the characters, if I were as religious as they are, and had this happen to me, I might well have made the same mistakes. The terror is in how wrong things can go for ultimately loving and decent people, how your one character flaw can REALLY mess you up in difficult situations.