The VVitch (double v's to tip us off to the film's old English trappings) is an immediately impressive horror film: an atmospheric slow burn. Subtitled on-screen as A New England Folk-Tale, the film follows a family of early American settlers who separate from their puritan community and attempt to make their way on their own. And almost immediately they are set upon by a seemingly endless succession of signs and effects of witchcraft. It's a real potpourri of classic early American folklore and earnest reports of witches out of New England history. This gives us a wonderful combination of authenticity - helped immensely by the cast and production design's ability to capture the period - and an entertaining kind of hellzapoppin' madness where anything can happen next and you never know what's around the next corner. And despite centering around a nuclear family, The VVitch isn't precious about keeping the unit whole or elevating children and animals out of harm's way. It's a rare horror film where you genuinely don't know who, if anyone, will be alive by the end of the film. And yet the characters are flush enough that it winds up satisfying on a dramatic level as well.
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1) 2016 LG DVD; 2) 2016 LG BD; 3) 2019 LG UHD. |
All three discs give you just the one, official 5.1 mix, lossy on the DVD but in DTS-HD on the blu and UHD (yes, it's the same DTS-HD track on both). And they all include optional English and Spanish subtitles.
Extras are also good but the same across all editions, except for the one minor advantage that the UHD doesn't have an over ten minute stretch of on-startup bonus trailers you have to skip like the DVD and blu. But they've all got a fairly engaging, if not super enlightening, audio commentary by the director, a roughly half hour Q&A with the director, star & two authors on Salem witches who dominate a little too much of the conversation, a nice but brief featurette that finally lets us hear from the rest of the cast, and a neat little stills gallery of design sketches. All three editions also each come in slick slipcovers. Oh and yes, the BD in the UHD combo-pack is the exact same BD that was sold in 2016, including the outer label.
So, is it worth double-dipping? It depends how dedicated you are to the Ultra HD. This is a solid 4k UHD that honors the uptick in format, but you're not getting a massively improved transfer or any new special features or anything. This is really a disc we should've gotten in 2016, but at least the price is alright, so a double-dip won't sting too badly. And hey, better late than never. But I imagine a lot of fans who would've bought the UHD version in 2016 will now just stick with the BDs they were stuck buying at the time. But if you've gotta have that UHD, it's finally here and it's as good as it should be.
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