The Witch

A Puritan family is expelled from a plantation in 1630s New England and settles at the edge of a wood. Their infant vanishes.

Eggers built it out of primary sources. Most of the dialogue is taken from period journals, court records and pamphlets, the farmhouse was constructed with period tools and joinery, and Jarin Blaschke lit interiors with candles alone. The effect is that the accent and syntax are difficult for the first fifteen minutes and then completely convincing.

Then it does something almost nothing else in folk horror does. The audience is invited to read it as a family destroying itself through religious paranoia, and in the last ten minutes the film says plainly that the witch was always real and always in the wood.

Whether Thomasin's ending is damnation or liberation is the argument, and Eggers has declined to settle it.

The goat was not trained and reportedly injured several people.