“The Witch” isn’t easy to watch. Set in Puritan New England, the settlers speak with the patois of the day. Their conversations are so hard to follow, I felt I was watching a foreign film without subtitles. But soon you start to get the drift; and once you do, the tension sets in and never lets up. The year is 1630 and William is banished from his Puritan settlement. He moves his wife and four children to a hard scrabble farm near a forbidding forest. Anya Taylor-Joy plays the oldest daughter and the main character, who takes her infant brother for a walk and loses him to something - a sinister force - in those woods. Soon her parents and siblings damn her as a witch. Then others in the family become suspect. Then she and her brother take to the woods, and all I can tell you is... I jumped. “The Witch” shows us a campfire story to remember. Like they used to say in the travel brochures - getting there is half the fun. Does it deliver what it promises? Ghost story. Is it entertaining? Full of tension. Is it worth the price of admission? High class horror in the style of “Rosemary’s Baby,” and that’s a compliment.
