Review:

Lysa Arryn and Dagmer Cleft Jaw from Game of Thrones are Puritans who have been exiled from their crappy village and have to make it on their own on their new crappy farm. The Witch is a horror movie, but not a 20XX horror movie like Annabelle or Paranormal Activity. The Witch is first and foremost a film and it also happens to have crafted story that builds tension and dread with fantastical elements; they didn't think of jump-scares and make up a story around them. The Witch has great acting, storytelling, and cinematography, but the pacing sometimes feels off as we rush parts I wanted to spend more time with and drug on minor details. The Witch isn't a blockbuster horror and if you aren't in the mindset to watch an actual film and be required to pay attention, The Witch is boring and largely uneventful. If you have the energy to watch The Witch like you'd watch something like The Shape of Water (the only comparison I am making is that it's not a "popcorn movie" but something more), The Witch is 90 minutes of edge of your seat uneasiness and suspense. The script and dialect are representative of the time, but in 2018 it feels odd hearing characters use a colonial vocabulary, but that's just part of the setting. The Witch is distributed by the same company that later gave us Hereditary, which is a better comparison to The Witch than other recent horror films.