I saw The Witch opening weekend, but The Witch is more suitable for home viewing so that you can read the subtitles since the audio quality is not the best, and the accents are quite thick. At one point, a character said, “Do you understand what I’m saying,” and my friend and I almost burst out laughing because for the majority of the film, the answer would be no, we didn’t.
The Witch is about a family who moved from England to the colonies and exiled for some reason, and the father is unwilling to repent. As they leave, even the Native Americans within the walls look at them as if to say, “Bruh, you’re screwed.” The family is initially happy because they are convinced that they are right with God, and the colony is wrong. They settle in a clearing by a dense forest. Supernatural shenanigans. Everyone blames everyone else.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS

Farm animals and woodland creatures go wild. Sexy voiced Satan appears and invites the oldest daughter to party naked in the woods with the witches and become one of them. I’m not kidding. When the black goat initially appears, I immediately thought, “Really.” What I thought would happen, happened. I watch too many movies. The black bunnies of terror were unintentionally funny. Not since Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Monty Python and The Holy Grail have bunnies been creatures of terror.
After watching a movie, I like to read about it. People call The Witch scarier than It Follows. Blasphemy! The homage to John Carpenter compels you! People say that it is a feminist narrative. I’m not cosigning the family’s brutal and unmerciful view of Christianity. You get to sleep inside and be warm while your kids are in the barn with the animals. Nope, but if Satan and his witches kill my family one by one, frame me, come to me after I just had to kill someone in self-defense and am completely vulnerable and ask me to party with them in the woods, sexy voiced Satan sounds more like a cult leader like Jim Jones or David Koresh, not a liberator. Yeah, I get that she can finally be herself, not feel like her body is innately sinful for having breasts and being cute and not have every moment of her life already assigned in service to someone else, but feminism is about having options. At that moment, she doesn’t feel like she has any. She is still adhering to a world where if you are x, then you are saved, and if you do y, you are damned. She has just flipped the same coin instead of saying that this polarizing view was always wrong. Her family is wrong. Satan is wrong.
The Witch’s atmosphere is really strong (creepy girl child that seems more like a small adult, check), and the story is at its strongest when the family turns into a McCarthy hearing, but I think that it is sadly overrated. I think that The Witch’s story needed a few more revisions. The beginning needed to clarify exactly why they were exiled, i.e. damned, in the first place. Pride is too vague, and sometimes when people were exiled, they had followers and established settlements elsewhere. What makes this particular family so irredeemable? Why don’t they have supporters? I needed more foreboding other than casting (hint: the breast feeding mother from Game of Thrones).
I get it. The Witch was using old historical accounts of how people described witchcraft to create a tale of terror, but we now know that those tales weren’t accurate so it didn’t work for me. There are real witches, Wiccans, who must be somewhat tired of being depicted as murderers. The Witch is more fun with witches as the default big bad, but now that we know that witches were just the historical way that people marginalized others when there wasn’t diversity like now, isn’t there a more effective postmodern way to look back on that historical period-keep the hysteria, demolish the marginalization and hysterical superstition, but look behind it to what is really happening? I’d love to see an examination of Tituba, who confessed to using witchcraft, avoided worse punishment, but probably did not mean a word of it.