Häxan

Benjamin Christensen spent two years and an enormous Swedish budget on what is nominally an educational film about medieval witchcraft. What he actually made is part lecture, part reconstruction, part hallucination, with sabbath sequences explicit enough to get it banned in the United States.

The argument underneath is the interesting part: that the women executed as witches were mentally ill, elderly, or simply poor and inconvenient, and that the twentieth century had swapped the stake for the asylum without much improving the odds. That reading was decades ahead of the scholarship.

Watch the original 1922 cut, not the 1968 reissue narrated by William Burroughs, which is fun and is a different film.