The VVitch

I've been wanting to watch The VVitch (2015) by Robert Eggers for a while; turns out that while it's not available for streaming in Australia (at least in the major streaming services), it is so in Mexico (and actually I find the Mexican Netflix catalogue to be in general way better than the one in Australia). I actually watched The Lighthouse (2019) first, his second big film, at a cinema in Melbourne right after it was released. I was extremely impressed with it and thought about it for a while; I've seen people label it (and The VVitch as well) as horror and, although for sure it has some elements that take it on that side, I feel like it falls on a category of its own.

Anyhow, I first heard about The VVitch from Robert Pattinson & Willem Dafoe in this interview. If you hadn't heard about it, you're surely wondering about the "VV" thing, as obviously "VVitch" is read as "Witch": the film is set on seventeenth-century New England, and supposedly this simply comes from a pamphlet from back in that day and the fact that then printing houses would use two V characters instead of a W, as that would save the need for the W typeface. In a nutshell, I'd say the film is a psychologycal-terror-thriller that interweaves the historical setting of the 1600's in New England with the popular tales carrying supernatural (involving witches, obviously) elements related to the religious fanaticism that was widespread back then. Robert Eggers has now a fame of doing his research and giving films a unique touch, historically accurate in quite many aspects while evidently creating a world of its own; when I saw The Lighthouse I was impressed with the dialogues, specially those by Willem Dafoe, and this similarly happens with The VVitch, where historically accurate rather means accurate according to the tales from that time (I'd recommend looking up the little references some of the scenes or the whole film make - the ones involving the baby, the goat, the Caleb kid, the raven, etc).

This one's definitely one to watch and one I'll be keeping as my favourite films.