I was in Nashville on Friday and read a glowing review of The VVitch. The review appeared in Scene magazine, which heralded the film to be a "masterpiece." Relying upon that review I saw the film the following Sunday. But, after suffering about an hour and a half through the movie, I walked out, leaving the two remaining movie-goers to absorb the balance of this truly awful film. It was that bad.
I really don't know where to start. The dialogue between the characters took on a fifteenth century vernacular that could not be fully understood without subtitles. The characters, the parents and their five children, (four after the baby got eaten) looked so squeaky clean that they might have been blasted with a pressure washer. The father incurred an accident where a musket rifle exploded in his face, yet he sustained no visible injury when he got home. The protagonist, whose name I never understood, fell from her horse to a soft bed of pine needle litter and emerged hours later from a phony unconsciousness with absolutely no evidence of an injury of any kind. She may have looked even better the she did before the fall. The firewood that the father chopped into kindling was of uniform length, clearly cut with a modern-day chainsaw. The boards nailed to the stable where the devil (a goat), resided, were milled. The dial on the mantle clock was a cheap, Asian outsourced knock off that can be purchased for $20.00 at VValMart, and probably was.
About the only redeeming aspect contained in this flop was its exposure of the nonsensical practice of religion. Nowadays, you can get plenty of that type of observation for free by simply unfolding a laptop and sitting down in your recliner with a coke that doesn't cost you $12.50.
The only thing that was missing was a jet flying over the hovel-like structure that served as a house for the characters. Ironically, the acting wasn't that bad. It's just that everything else was. Admittedly, I didn't see the movie through to its end. It's like this -- even if the ending rivaled One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, it wouldn't have resurrected the rest. The VVitch was dead on arrival. I would add an anthropomorphic tattoo on the forehead of this dead body of directorial malpractice, imploring the viewing public -- "Do Not Resuscitate!"
The VVitch was a total bitch to endure. I suggest that you don't.
