L Thomas

There are a number of reviews that recite the talking points: unsettling, eerie, chilling, creepy, tense, psychological horror, suspense, frightening, unnerving, disturbing, etc. These are all scary movie catch-words that are good for marketing, but most of these words are not accurate for this movie. The cinematography in this case was a crutch for a bad movie. Good cinematography enhances an already good movie. It should not be considered a great accomplishment that you went to New England in the fall to shoot a movie about a family in New England in the fall. It’s not a replacement for good writing. The title is misleading. There is no single witch that is the focus of the movie. One makes her appearance early in the movie as a figure dashing through the woods with a stolen baby. The movie then turns into at least an hour-long family survival drama far less interesting than Little House on the Prairie. Failing crops, empty animal traps, and kids doing farm chores do not make for a scary witch movie. We can’t even safely blame the family’s food troubles on a witch curse, because the movie never establishes a motive for such a curse. A witch never even makes another appearance until near the end of the movie. Thomasine dropped an egg that broke open and revealed that there was a chick inside it. There was a dark rabbit in the woods that would just sit there twitching its nose. Some scenes ended with some annoying screechy music. These were supposed to create a sense of foreboding, but after each event was about a half-hour of nothing. Then after practically zero pacing, everything happens in the last five or ten minutes of the movie. There’s a bird, a cackling mom, a father chopping wood, a mad goat, something falling through the roof of the barn, and a girl in front of a fire. The movie was a mish-mosh of disconnected un-scary themes that didn’t come together to tell any kind of coherent story.