So this is Robert Eggers’ first movie, and it’s clearly an Eggers movie, but I think also probably his weakest film.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s got a lot going for it. It’s got great cinematography[1], it has a legitimately historical feel (unlike, e.g., that Netflix witch horror trilogy), it’s got a tense Ligeti-esque soundtrack, and it establishes a kind of isolated frontier mood, with the forest looming as a place of wild terror.

It’s also got a family that’s falling apart under the domination of a religious zealot father, with a mother who becomes increasingly withdrawn as escalating disasters beset their family; and of course, with a title like this, you know there’s going to be a feminist angle on it. (It’s been a long time since witches were anything but a metaphor for female rebelliousness against oppression.)

It’s all decent, solid B+ kind of stuff. But it’s very conventional, and there’s none of the wild intensity of The Lighthouse or the fantastic historical surrealism of The Northman. It’s the kind of movie that you watch and are like, “hey, this Eggers guy shows a lot of promise, this is some interesting stuff.”

  1. (Although a thing that was obtrusive to me: It’s very gray and low-contrast. I was reading an article about how the move to shooting in log formats (which are designed to capture more information in-camera but look gray and flat when viewed natively and need to be run through a mapping to look right onscreen) got a bunch of filmmakers kinda twisted, because they got used to viewing their daily footage as raw log, and it made them subconsciously think that was normal, affecting their final color grade. This is extremely that.) ↩︎