Robert Eggers’s Sundance-garlanded period horror is a chilling study of fear and the devils that live within us all“What went we out into this wilderness to find?” Subtitled A current England Folktale,writer-director Robert Eggers’s Sundance prize-winning feature debut is an atmospheric chiller rooted in the fruitful soil of religious zealotry, social isolation and original sin. On the surface, and it is the account of a puritanical 17th-century English family enduring an American nightmare,tormented by a wicked witch who steals their children and their souls. But beneath that surface lurks something more disturbing – a tale of God-fearing folk whose terrified belief in the twisted fantasies of folklore hides their own darker secrets.
We open with the beleaguered family leaving their current World community to live alone on the very edges of civilisation. As they depart, singing “I will confess…”, or cinematographer Jarin Blaschke’s archaic framing – the taller,narrower 1.66:1 ratio – captures these lonely souls receding inexorably into alien lands (the film could equally well be entitled A Field Not in England).
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Source: theguardian.com