"The Witch" Is A Bitch, Darlings!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But I Loved It!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                  Robert Eggers--whom I have no idea if he is related to the overrated author Dave Eggers--is an assured director.  His film, "The Witch," is a triumph of style over substance. Through his script, allowing for a series of brilliant acting performances from every member of the cast, art and set decoration and cinematography that elicit a genuinely creepy atmosphere, evoking both a period style, and an ambiguity recalling "The Blair With Project"--but no hand held cameras, in this one!!!!!!!!!--to a story that has been told many times before becomes especially compelling.

                                   I loved it. My beloved did not.  Which is why I make all the  artistic decisions in our home!

                                    More to the point, I have to tell you, girls, this film has the second best performance ever given by a goat on film.  The first was the white goat, that just basically stood before the camera, and looked menacing, in Dante Tomaselli's 2002 film, "Horror."

                                      It has taken fourteen years for a goat to command the screen again, and the one here, aptly named Black Phillip, is brilliant, interacting with the actors in ways never before seen. Come next year, Black Phillip should get an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor.  I mean, if  we are talking about diversity, dears..................

                                      But this goat is matched by everyone in the film.  Ralph Ineson, whose deranged religious hypocrisy allows the entrance of evil onto his place, Kate Dickie, at times looking like an emaciated Vanessa Redgrave, who will follow whatever her husband says, however wrong it is. And the three who play their children--twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson) who do some pretty difficult work here. None more so than their oldest sister, Thomasin, played by Anya Taylor-Joy) whose haunting performance carries the film.  And raises the question--when the baby, Samuel, is abducted and never found, evil has entered, but who brought it forth--Thomasin, or her father????  I say the latter, though Thomasin's choice at the end, and the final shots, replicating paintings of the Crucifixion and Mary's Assumption, have got to be seen to be believed.

                                       Except for the scene stealing by Black Phillip, nothing in "The Witch" has not been done before.  But it hasn't been done as dramatically, compellingly, and stylistically, in recent memory!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                         See it, darlings!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                         And here is Black Phillip in all his glory, girls!!!!!!!!!!  A star is born!!!!!!!