This is a nice recent horror movie that gets me and what I like to see in genre films. Movies that leave you thinking are my favorite and this one made you meet it halfway with the subtitle: A New England Folk Tale. Folk Tales are usually cautionary tales that are specific to a locality. Like Urban Legends, they let you know the dangers of straying too far from the herd. The Witch is all about conformity and rebellion. A man moves his family outside the protections of a Christian township due to differences in their beliefs. They move to the edge of a forest that is said to be inhabited by a witch. When the newborn baby goes missing under the elder daughter's care, things start to unravel quickly.
I know a lot of people were put off by the ending (which I won't spoil here) but you have to imagine this as a story told around a campfire to keep the youngsters in line. "Don't shun your community or this could very well happen..." is the unspoken line of the storyteller here. That the movie was filled with wonderful ambiguity before that is just walking that tight rope of "will this people end up ok?"
I had a slight problem with the thickness of the accents at times, but closed captioning remedied that. Otherwise, if you like slow-burn horror, this is the movie for you. Tell em Black Peter sent ya.
Black Philip!
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