Audience Reviews
View All (1000+) audience reviews Violet R Fabulous! Gripping, suspenseful, intelligent. Unforgettable! My favorite new director Rated 5/5 Stars • Rated 5 out of 5 stars 03/24/25 Full Review harry r It's one of the best modern horror movies but it's not your typical horror movie. Rated 5/5 Stars • Rated 5 out of 5 stars 03/16/25 Full Review W C S My eyes were glued to the screen for most of the movie. Rated 4.5/5 Stars • Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 03/08/25 Full Review Jacob B I was afraid that Mr. Eggers would make this little gem and then we’d never hear from him again. I couldn’t be more thrilled that his filmmaking career took off after this, and deservedly so (“NOSFERATU” was outstanding) since he was able to craft, with such a small budget and cast, an incredibly effective chiller. Great horror movies, for me, are more metaphoric rather than literal, they are restrained rather than over the top, they are suggestive rather than in your face, and they are made with a sense of realism to them. Here, a family living on the edge of the unknown wilderness in 1600s New England, slowly begins to unravel. Isolation, religious zealotry, superstition and fear of the unknown are the sources of dread. Eggers seems to instinctively knows how to tap into our almost childhood-like fear of things that go bump in the night, quiet, open spaces, a dark forest…and family. Rated 5/5 Stars • Rated 5 out of 5 stars 03/25/25 Full Review Mary B Another one of this director’s films that ends up being a snoozefest, praised by pseudo-intellectuals who pretend to enjoy it. Once again, his direction and cinematography are undeniably impressive and stunning—like something out of a Rembrandt painting—but the characters and screenplay fall flat. Ultimately, it’s just another visually breathtaking yet painfully dull film, much like the rest of his work. Being visually beautiful doesn’t make it a great movie; it just means he excels at aesthetics. He should stick to visual art and leave filmmaking and screenwriting to someone with real storytelling talent. Rated 2/5 Stars • Rated 2 out of 5 stars 03/06/25 Full Review Leonardo B The Gentle Whispers of Evil. - The short story, the fable, the fantastic tale teach us that there is a huge distance between scare and horror.The former is nothing more than an instrument, often exaggerated, and the seventh art has used it to exhaustion, mostly in its cheapest form: the scare-jump. The latter is the product of an intelligent and elaborate use of narrative resources that, in its best examples, refers to the ancient and paradigmatic oral stories in which the imagination of the good speaker stimulated that of his audience in a skillful framework of words, gestures, and brief, accurate, enigmatic silences.Honoring good horror with overwhelming historical precision, hurtful subtleties and dignified graphic sobriety, Robert Eggers reminds us of the ancient, fearful and forgotten truths of witchcraft, relegating the owner of the Blair Woods to the role of a poor, unpleasant old woman. All the elements that the sub-genre can draw on at its roots flow with terrifying naturalness from the first minutes of a story that makes tension its sharpest tool. The dark forest, possession, human sacrifice, the temptation of the flesh, the pact with evil, the blood rite, the cursed animals, the forbidden book as an evil mirror of the other, which does not seem to help at all, parade in their best finery.But if the convincing acts of witchcraft presented with no modesty before our eyes were not enough to hurt sensibilities, the elegant narrator's pen gives us the horror of a ruthless lifestyle, feeding on a fanaticism that refers to the least lucid ways of facing the most fearsome misfortunes.When evil finds no obstacle, prayers are answered by silence and the righteous pay for sinners, the road to the coven is paved with friendly, gentle whispers. Rated 4/5 Stars • Rated 4 out of 5 stars 03/05/25 Full Review Read all reviews
