The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

Honourable Mentions: Mad Max: Fury Road, Sicario, Spotlight

Robert Eggers has developed a strong brand for folksy, gothic horror over the decade or so since he first emerged as a director, but this wasn't so much a slow, steady process as it was a bolt from the blue, with his directorial debut, 2015's The Witch, arguably remaining his finest work to date.

Set in 17th-century colonial America and telling the story of a settler family whose child is abducted in plain sight, The Witch operates at a molecule-vibrating frequency from the very beginning and doesn't really let up from that point on, with a veil of darkness and paranoia draping down and suspicions falling on Anya Taylor-Joy's Thomasin - all the while an unassuming black goat, Phillip, moves slowly into the picture.

Eggers' film is unrelentingly grey during the day, with dusk giving way to inky darkness interrupted by dim candlelight and ultimately, in a moment of levitational "good for her" catharsis, a roaring flame. But as good as the resolution is (and it is an all-timer), Eggers pulls off an even better trick over the course of his debut, and one that he's employed repeatedly in the years since.

Like the very best of gothic and folk fiction, The Witch taps into a horror that feels primordial and somewhat distant, and yet, by the time the credits close, the proximity of that connection becomes almost unbearably close. It's a feature that both distinguishes The Witch as a uniquely transformational horror film of the 2010s and one that roots itself with the very best of its genre forebears. A triumph all around.