Bewitched? Bothered.

The Eggers film The Witch is so ridiculous and unpleasant as to deserve little comment, but as some have praised it I'll weigh in for a moment. The film seems, at first, to be about a man banished from a 17th-century New England "plantation" (unnamed, looks like it may have been filmed at the Plymouth replica?) for his extreme religious views. He sets off with his wife and 5 children to build his own remote farm, but we soon learn that he's not a very competent settler (although that seems to be a plot point in the film, I'm pretty impressed that he could build a farm house, barn, etc. basically on his own). Gradually, we begin to see that the children are tormented or possessed by evil witches - who kill the youngest child, later lure the oldest son into captivity and take over his mind - and the parents suspect that the oldest child is the perpetrator of the witchery. I kept thinking the movie was about the religious fanaticism and how that leads the family into strange and self-destructive delusions, but in fact everything about the movie suggests that the witches are real forces lurking in the forest, possessing the spirit of various animals, taking over the minds of everyone in the family, whether by actual possession or by driving them to insanity through torment, who knows? And who cares? The premise of the movie is to off kilter I was never caught up in it for a moment - though I might have been had it been a psychological drama rather than a horror film. What’s worse, whether because of poor prodoction or the incompetence of the actors, especially thie children, or the archaic langauge (closing credits say much of the dialogue came from documents of the time) the strange British-Colonia acccents and the whispered dialog I think I could understand maybe half of what was spoken. Half was too much.