Anya Taylor-Joy (Rafy/A24)

An appropriately bleak movie for late winter, The Witch is this season’s indie horror darling. Reports that it’s the scariest movie since [insert your horrifying movie here] may not pan out—I scare fairly easily but didn’t jump in my seat once. Yet Robert Eggers, in his confident directorial debut, isn’t interested in jump scares. What he offers instead is an immersive and sinister atmosphere in a seemingly innocent world.

The movie is set in 1630. William (Ralph Ineson) is an English farmer who has settled in New England. As the movie begins, the church sends William and his family to leave their plantation for land on the edge of an unwelcoming forest. When William’s teenaged daughter Thomasina (Anya Taylor-Joy) takes her infant sibling into the woods for a stroll, she stops to play peekaboo with the baby—and it disappears.

The trouble in the woods is not just supernatural. After Thomasina returns from the woods without their sibling, her younger brother Caleb (the somehow appropriately named Harvey Scrimshaw) seems to discover that his big sister is becoming a beautiful young woman, eyeing her curiously as she sleeps. When Caleb disappears, and then reappears under some kind of enchantment, Thomasina’s family begins to suspect she’s the enchantress.

The Witch is indeed about evil, not just spiritual but social. Thomasina is in danger not just from the creepy old woman in the woods but from her own family’s judgement and hysteria (and goat). Eggers’ script is taken from fairy tales and contemporary accounts of witchcraft and possession, and the combination of arcane language and thick accents makes for dialogue that can be difficult to understand. Still, the actors, especially Taylor-Joy and Ineson, make convincing pilgrims. Jarin Blaschke’s natural-light cinematography is bleakly beautiful, and with the help of Mark Korven’s brooding, angular score, the film has the look and sound of a carefully art directed natural hell.

The movie also offers something no other recent movie does: demonic animals. The movie’s breakout role may well be Black Phillip—a goat. A goat that currently has a decidedly un-1630 twitter account.

The film’s desperate search for a missing child combined with its arthouse sensibility suggests a Walking Dead episode directed by Bela Tarr. But at 92 minutes, this is no punishing Belatarrathon. The Witch shows too much of its evil to the naked eye for it to be truly frightening, and the final revelation makes clear what might have been better off staying ambiguous. This arthouse horror is not the kind of scare fest you expect to see at the multiplex, so gore hounds should temper expectations accordingly. Moviegoers looking for an atmospheric allegory about a world gone mad will have a better time.

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The Witch
Written and directed by Robert Eggers
With Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie
Rated R for disturbing violent content and graphic nudity
92 minutes
Opens today at Regal Gallery Place, AMC Loews Georgetown, Regal Potomac Yard, AMC Courthouse, Regal Hyattsville and other area multiplexes.