Around 1630, William (Ralph Ineson) and his family are exiled from Plimoth Plantation, the first Puritan colony in the New World, for espousing religious heresy. We're not told what the heresy is, but it may have to do with the need to earn your salvation. The Puritans were Calvinists: you are born saved or damned, and there is nothing you can do about it. Your good or evil works are just evidence that you were "born that way."
But working for your salvation is even worse, because no matter how many good works you do, one sin will cast it all aside When I was growing up, it was the same: the Nazarene Church taught Christian perfection. You could be totally holy for every moment of your life, except for one moment of doubt that you forgot to repent for, and that was enough to spend eternity in the Lake of Fire.
Back to my childhood...um. I mean the Puritans. They try to start a farm, but William is no good at farming, or hunting, or building things, or...well, anything but chopping wood, which he does obsessively. He's also not a great role model: he steals his wife's heirloom silver cup, then blames his teenage daughter, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy). He decides to sell her to another family, to make ends meet.
He tells his son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) to lie about their failed hunting trip, and gets angry when he asks whether unbaptized babies go to heaven.
When their infant son vanishes, we see that a witch has grabbed him to use his blood for a flying spell, but the family blames Thomasin for not keeping an eye on him.
Meanwhile, the twins are tormenting their goat, named Black Phillip, and claim that he talks to them. The family blames Thomasin for that, too.
Then Caleb, who has been sneaking peeks at his sister's bosom, disappears. We see that he has been lured to the witche's hut: she appeared as an attractive woman with a large bosom, and kissed him before reverting to her true form. He returns to the farm the next daked and babbling. The family thinks he is being bedeviled by the witch, and try to pray: but the twins have forgotten their prayer! They claim that Thomasin used witchcraft to keep their mouths shut, and she claims that they are witches, so of course they cannot pray. After a moment of ecstatic lucidity, where he claims that he sees Jesus, Caleb dies.
Thomasin angrily confronts William over his many misdeeds, but insists that she is not the witch. He can't decide, so he locks her and the twins in the goat house.
During the night, things go wrong. Mom gets a vision of her two dead sons, and ends up nursing a crow. Black Peter head-butts William, knocking him into his two-story tall pile of logs and killing him. Then the ram kills the twins.
Mom concludes that Thomasin is responsible for the murders, and attacks; Thomasin must kill her in self-defense.
Sh asks Black Peter to speak to her. He asks: "Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?"
Yeah, that sounds cool.
Taking the form of a man (Daniel Malik), he asks her to write her name in a book, then leads her into the forest, where she joins a coven of witches in their ecstatic gyrating around a fire. They all start to levitate.
Several reviews have found queer codes in the outsiders lurking in the woods, the Others who threaten the heterosexual nuclear family, when someone inside the family may be one of them as well.
The witches are evil, of course, murdering people either tu use in spells or to please Black Peter; but they also provide a queer space. Black Phillip offers Thomasin the opportunity to "don't dream it, be it," to embrace her lesbian identity.
More after the break
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