TakaNekro Retro Reviews – The VVITCH (2016)

With October on the horizon, it’s that time of year again when scary movies come into vogue and we have an appropriate excuse to start watching horror movies again. Nothing is ever out of style for me, and the list of horror titles at my disposal are plentiful, so for the first TakaNekro Retro Review, I will be giving my take on 2016’s The VVITCH directed by Robert Eggers and starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, and Kate Dickie.

This horror flick is set in 1650s New England, centered around a family of seven who are seemingly happy to leave behind their village and religious community to live out on their own next to an eerie forest out in the distance. Times are tough for patriarch William and his wife Katherine, as their attempts to cultivate corn have not been successful and the family is low on funds. Add to this the disappearance of their baby, Samuel, and the stress could not get any higher. The focus of the movie is not on the parents, however, but their daughter Thomasin who is easy to suspect as a proxy for an unknown witch who haunts the woods.

This was an interesting story to go through following this family just as things started to go from bad to worse for them. A child disappears and as the audience we are already made aware of what’s happened, leaving the unsuspecting family out of the loop. Actually, it’s when they start suspecting too much that communication becomes strained between them. Though the family is supposed

to upkeep their religious beliefs, there is a lot of hipocracy that comes to the surface as the story progresses. Like any normal family, their lies that haunt them as they struggle to make ends meet, and rules are broken for the sake of their unity, but not without consequences that set them against each other.

The period setting is important, and it definitely takes some getting used to – like listening to a proper Shakespearean play unfolding on the big screen. The slow burn cultivates in a surprise ending that, while a little rushed, leaves you feeling that this is the only way things could have turned out after all of the trauma the family went through to get to the end. I’ve personally seen much more engaging stories, but The VVITCH was not a bad watch at all and is a recommended must-see for the upcoming horror movie season.

Story: 6/10
Music & Sound: 8/10
Scares: 6/10
Gore: 4/10

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