Director Roger Eggers
Staring Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie
Rated MA
Score 4/6

A family in 1630s New England is torn apart by the forces of witchcraft, black magic and possession.

Before I get too far into things a couple of bits of news wahoo!! The second time is a charm my plans did not fall through and I got to go to a media screening for The Witch, though this time the screening was a little closer to home. This ties into my second piece of news being that The Witch is being released in Australian cinemas on March 17th.

For those of you who are interested The Witch is the feature length directorial debut for Roger Eggers (who also wrote the movie) and that with this movie won the Directing Award in the U.S. Dramatic category at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. So Roger congratulations on the Sundance Award. Dialogue wise The Witch sounded completely different to a lot of movies set in that time period and even though where a couple of jump scares through the movie I thought it was great that Eggers held off for any major scare till towards the end of the movie. Though after watching this I can’t help but wonder if The Witch would have a bigger impact on me if I had of watched it on DVD instead of at the friendly neighbourhood cinema.
Now maybe it’s because I’m a little too cynical or more likely that I have no real problem on being by myself I really did not see the banishment the family was sentenced to as necessarily a bad thing. Yes I get it that in that period banishment was like a death sentence, but to be perfectly clear this is coming from somebody who has a habit of shutting himself away from the world.
Eggers had a solid cast to work with all of whom I was completely unfamiliar with. After watching this I have a feeling that I am going to remember Ralph Ineson based purely on his voice and I was kind of impressed with Ellie Grainger and Lucas Dawson who played the twins Mercy and Jonas. I believe that child actors have a tendency to give great performances early on in their careers before they learn to be self conscious in front of the camera.