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My favorite aspect of The Witch is how little concession it has for a modern audience. Everything about the characters; their values, their speech, their religious paranoia, feels alien and unsettling. Even the themes of the story seem reactionary and alarmist. The devil is real, and lives among these poor people, corrupting their souls towards sin. The father, who thinks he is without sin has in his heart committed the great sin of pride, and has doomed his family for it. As the subtitle suggests, The movie feels like a fragment from another time and culture, and like many old stories, its moral is counter-intuitive to a progressive, secular audience. It is a window into a psyche crippled by the self inflicted terrors of its own faith. I also think it succeeds as a horror film, and I love the look of it.
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