Critics reviews

What's actually happening in The Witch is nothing less momentous than a first-time filmmaker successfully crafting a classic. The talent on display in Eggers's debut is staggering, even if its deployment is often very subtle.

A fine and subtle horror movie, effectively grounded in its Puritan background.

One of the most intelligent American horror films of recent years... The film is skillfully wrought and imaginatively conceived. Shot in remote Ontario, the movie is superbly designed, impressively researched and extremely well written, drawing much of its dialogue from 17th-century diaries, letters and prayer manuals. Suspense is largely a matter of premonition.

We are aware from the first shot that this is a Serious Film, more Arthur Miller than Eduardo Sanchez, because the cinematography is trendily washed out, the better to show off the blood that spatters every other scene. There are visual echoes of Goya; the end title informs us loftily that much of the dialogue comes from period sources. The filmmakers are so desperate to be taken seriously that they've forgotten to have much fun.

Stripping the familiar horror trope of the demon-beleaguered ‘cabin in the woods' right back to its folkloric, fairytale origins, Robert Eggers' The Witch marries a studied realism to a highly subjectified and rigorously period-appropriate surrealism. The results prove deeply unsettling – while also conjuring, through the echoes of history, a ghostly image of America today, where ideological extremisms can still engender their own alternative reality.

The precise, old-world dialogue lends an air of formality, which suits a setting that resembles a Grimm fairy tale. The colour palette is specific and rich: forest green, bleached corn yellow, the brown and cream uniform that all characters wear. When blood tarnishes these hues, it's a statement as informed by images as it is ideas.

Academics, folklorists and historians will marvel at the linguistic cultural veracity of the film. The Witch, which is subtitled 'A New-England Folktale', is astoundingly well researched and sourced. The script is so freighted with genuine 17th-century language and ideas that it should be essential viewing for historians and academic folklorists as much as for a general witch-hungry genre crowd.

The Witch is a meticulously crafted chamber piece... Because The Witch is sparing in its use of special effects and generates suspense and foreboding through what is suggested rather than what is seen, throughout the film the audience is forced to consider where danger really emanates: From intolerance, isolation, or zealotry? From hallucination or supernatural possession? Or is the danger truly hidden, deep within a woman's vagina?

It's startling to see a movie where you know that zero compromises have been made. That the director has done exactly what he set out to do. It's startling to see (especially) a film that does not 1. reach for a brass ring in terms of emotion/effects/make-a-big-splash or 2. try to be comprehensible/acceptable/swallow-able to the widest possible audience. Director Robert Eggers, in his first feature The Witch, has made a film that is difficult, a film that requires a LOT of the viewer.

Drenched in anxiety and terror, as the threat of witchcraft begins to poison the family's faith and relationships, Eggers's film is part black-magic horror and part psychodrama—a Vermeer come to gothic life, thanks also to the precise and arresting compositions of cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, a frequent collaborator of Eggers's.

This is a deliberately paced film, of slow zooms, of camera drifts, of tortured silences. Eggers has said he was as inspired by the work of Ingmar Bergman as more obvious reference points like The Shining, and one can feel a debt to the Swedish master throughout, the film's anguished battles of body and spirit set in claustrophobic spaces recalling such titles as The Silence, Persona, and Hour of the Wolf.

With the aid of cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, Eggers suggests how rapidly phantasmagorias spread in daytime shadows or by the light of the moon. Eggers's script dramatizes the existential plight of true believers who stumble into torments from the Book of Revelations. Unlike Arthur Miller in The Crucible, he doesn't reshape their lives to fit a modern political message. He compels us to experience their prickly uncertainty and escalating horror.