MICAH MERTES movie critic
Each weekend, we get new movies. Some weekends, we get awesome obscenities like "The Witch." This is a weird miracle of a wide release, a meticulously made and challenging-to endure art film under the guise of a midnight madness horror movie. It's not going to be for everyone, and that's what makes it so special.
"The Witch" is about a family in 1630s New England that gets banished from its community. They leave to build a farm on the edge of a sinister woods, where they're gradually terrorized by evil forces from without and within. Their stark piety is almost as menacing as the actual monster living just beyond the tree line.
For his debut, writer/ director Robert Eggers has crafted a deeply immersive experience, complete with period accurate detail (such as era-appropriate dialect that isn't always easy to parse). "The Witch" is slow, it's thematically adventurous, it's going to offend a lot of folks.
Oh, and it's really scary. Not a jump-scare kind of scary but, like, a this-corrupts-my-soul kind of scary. Rated R.