"We will conquer this wilderness. It will not consume us."

I saw this back when it came out w/ no prior knowledge of what it was and the theater we went to must have had a dying light in the projector because every shot was so dim that I had to squint for every night scene and I'm pretty sure I brought my glasses that night. Being that they shot this in (ALLEGEDLY) as much natural light as available, it induced a hypnotic effect on the audience, so much so that the crow scene got some audible gasps and half-screams that I'll never forget.

Anyway, this is still a great minimalist period horror that while occasionally elliptical in ways that A24 has now made annoying never cheats narratively. Whether this is exactly how people spoke in 1630s New England is immaterial to me as a viewer because if the writers and cast had rigidly stuck to Olde English, the pronunciation alone would render the dialogue incomprehensible and filmmakers have investors to deliver a return to, not historians to please.

Evocation over accuracy is the name of the game here and it succeeds at locking my head into the past's fear of the unknown that for all they knew could have been God or Black Phillip because faith, their families, and the land were all these people had for centuries but this evil remains as natural as the mother earth herself. Throw in physical isolation, maternal envy, and puritan hypocrisy that only serves to narrow their miserable lives into a cascade of bad decisions reinforced by their faith feedback loop (They consider both conception and childbirth inherent sins on their own ffs), and seeing baby Anya Taylor-Joy float off into night sky becomes a happy ending imv.

I guess if there is anything that holds it back when put next to Robert Eggers and Jarin Blaschke's other features, the cinematography matches the cold grey unromantic drudgery of settler life as the cost of allowing other perspectives to enter the realm of plausibility. There is ambiguity here, obviously, but its function is more theatrical than cinematic at times. I retain a soft spot in my heart for this elevated horrorcore out of all the elevated horrorcores because it never loses sight of why we're here to begin w/, but these images only serve the story and rarely expand on the displayed ideas of primal yonic spiritualism, even when the nocturnal montages are on the verge of approaching the poetic, something The Lighthouse makes a big swing for, even if I find myself fence-riding on those themes more after each rewatch. This is the closest to an unashamed genre film that we're likely to get from this studio at a time where every other release from them feels like one trust fund kid after another dumping their what-ifs-and-then-whats against the backdrop of a bunch of disconnected anxieties that maybe should have stayed in their therapy sessions. Anyway, didn't mean to sound this negative at the end here because I am looking forward to Eggers' Nosferatu reboot since that sounds like it's finally coming together.