Review of The Witch (2016) by Elan K — 01 Sep 2016

"The Witch" is the directorial debut from Robert Eggers and is about a series of unfortunate events plaguing a family after they choose to depart from their village. "The Witch" stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie.

Now this was a film I was quite looking forward to as I am a huge horror movie geek and I had heard nothing but positive things about the film. Now I must say this was probably my favourite film I have seen so far this year, however it is not for everyone.

Just everything about this film I thought was incredible, just on a technical stand point the cinematography in this film was a sight to witness and adds so much to this enthralling story which you can so easily get lost in.

This movie was very interesting for the fact that it takes place in the 1630's and includes a mix of shakespearian and modern english dialogue which could have went one of two ways, either it'll sound really forced coming from the actors or they'll sound completely genuine and the audience will totally buy into the stick.

Luckily this is a case of all the actors being completely stellar and strong enough to deliver these performances that were shown in this movie, I did not think there was one flat performance and even when one of the actors seemed to falter he really won me back with a deeply disturbing scene where he just lets loose.

Now like I was saying this movie will not be for everybody, many people will go into this expecting a horror film similar to many of the mainstream horror movies released nowadays and they will be thoroughly disappointed as "The Witch" is not one of those films flushed out with a bunch of jumpscares.

This is a methodical film that takes its time to build itself up and some people may not be used to that and I am here to to tell you today that even though this film advertises seeing the witch itself, you actually see the witch less in this movie than you do the babadook in "The Babadook", this is not meant as a spoiler but more of a warning.

So "The Witch" was a deeply suspenseful film that affected me on many levels, I couldn't take my eyes off the screen through the whole runtime, the score for this film was another profound film, I absolutely loved the way the it built up.

and though I had slight problems with the film such as the strong english accents being hard to understand sometimes and colour palette being too grey at times, they didn't detract away from the film, for that reason "The Witch" receives a 10/10.