The Witch ignores tricks of contemporary horror trade

REVIEW: A slow and sinister exercise in ever-escalating dread, The Witch is quite unlike any other horror movie you have ever seen. Or felt.

THE WITCH(MA15+)

Director: Robert Eggers (feature debut)

Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson.

Rating: 4/5

An innocent mistake or a spelling error?

A slow and sinister exercise in ever-escalating dread, The Witch is quite unlike any other horror movie you have ever seen. Or felt.

Meticulous in detail and addictively mystifying in overall execution, this stupefying chiller draws an array of intense reactions with great subtlety, precision and power.

The year is 1630. A British family has hastily emigrated to America, possibly due to the blasphemous religious beliefs of the father of the clan, William (Ralph Ineson).

Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) was taking care of her baby sister when she went missing — and is accused of sacrificing her while practising witchcraft. Picture: Universal Pictures.

Together with his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) and four children, William not only finds the going tough on the new frontier, but also inexplicably strange. The youngest member of the family, a newborn baby, has vanished into thin air.

The Witch trailer is the scariest thing you’ll ever see

At the time of his disappearance, the infant was in the care of eldest child Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy). Two of her younger siblings, twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson), have reason to believe she sacrificed the baby while practising witchcraft.

The other sibling, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), is inclined to keep an open mind about what happened.

However, with other, darker influences closing in on him, Caleb may not be able to protect Thomasin from the poisonous cloud of suspicion engulfing their home.

That The Witch so wilfully ignores familiar tricks of the contemporary horror trade — right down to its spare use of dialogue, delivered in an antique version of the English language — will be sure to frustrate some viewers.

However, it will definitely frighten many more once word gets out about the weird, worrying wavelength on which it transmits its menacing message.