ver since making his Sundance debut with (2015), Robert Eggers has been eyed as a potential breakout from his class of millennial name-brand auteurs. There’s a long history of horror movies making a splash at that festival—going back to another () at the turn of the century—but this austere portrait of 17th-century New England suggested that Eggers was chasing something different. An essay by Lauren Wilford for in 2017 argued for as “[a] polyphonic work…it can be difficult to suss out the author’s own view among the many sensitively rendered perspectives.” Locating the film’s influences in painters like Friedrich, Goya, and Vermeer, Wilford further predicted that Eggers might one day live up to the standard of his professed cinephilic inspirations, Ingmar Bergman
