What Is the Metacritic Rating for The Witch Part 1 The Subversion

The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion does not have a Metacritic rating. Despite the film’s strong critical reception and commercial success, it remains absent from Metacritic’s database. This absence is not uncommon for non-English language films, particularly those from regions outside North America and Western Europe where Metacritic’s review coverage is thinnest.

The omission is especially notable given that the 2018 South Korean thriller earned significant acclaim elsewhere, which makes the gap in Metacritic’s coverage particularly worth understanding for film enthusiasts and serious viewers seeking comprehensive critical data.

For those seeking critical consensus on The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion, other major platforms provide robust ratings that fill this gap. Rotten Tomatoes critics gave it 89%, while the film achieved an 86% audience score on the same platform. IMDb users assigned it a 7.2 out of 10 rating.

These aggregated scores reveal a genuinely well-received film with stronger critical than audience appreciation—a meaningful distinction that suggests the film’s genre complexity and narrative approach resonated more powerfully with professional critics than with casual viewers.

Table of Contents

• Why Isn’t The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion On Metacritic?
• Understanding Where The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion Is Actually Rated
• Critical Reception and What The 89% Rotten Tomatoes Score Reveals
• Comparing Audience and Critic Scores
• Making Sense of Multiple Ratings: A Practical Guide
• The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion in the Context of Korean Cinema
• Finding Ratings Across Platforms Today
• Conclusion

Why Isn’t The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion On Metacritic?

metacritic‘s coverage of non-English language films remains inconsistent, particularly for Asian cinema outside of major international festivals. The platform prioritizes reviews from outlets in English, which creates inherent geographic and linguistic limitations in what gets indexed.

South Korean films, despite the global rise of Korean cinema following successes like Parasite (which does have a Metacritic score of 96), are still sometimes overlooked during their initial theatrical releases.

The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion released in June 2018, during a period when streaming availability was more fragmented and international distribution was less coordinated than it is today. This limitation matters because many viewers use Metacritic as their primary source for critical consensus.

The platform’s metascore has become something of a cultural shorthand for “is this film actually good?” Its absence for The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion means readers cannot access that particular form of critical aggregation, even though the film unquestionably deserves critical consideration.

This highlights a real limitation of Metacritic’s coverage model—films from Korea, Japan, India, and other major film-producing nations sometimes fall through the cracks, not because they lack critical merit, but because they lack English-language review infrastructure that Metacritic’s algorithm requires.

Understanding Where The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion Is Actually Rated

rotten Tomatoes picked up coverage of The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion and indexed 89% from critics, making it one of the highest-rated films of 2018 in the science fiction thriller genre.

This platform’s broader international reach means it captures reviews in multiple languages and from diverse geographic sources, giving it better coverage of Korean cinema than Metacritic provides. The critics’ score of 89% represents what is considered “Universal Acclaim” on Rotten Tomatoes, a designation reserved for films with genuinely strong critical consensus.

The imdb rating of 7.2/10 presents a different perspective, drawn from user ratings rather than professional critic aggregation. IMDb’s system is open to any registered user, which means it blends expert opinion, casual viewers, and enthusiasts into a single score.

For context, a 7.2 on IMDb is considered above average and indicates solid viewer appreciation.

The meaningful gap between the Rotten Tomatoes critics score (89%, which would equate to roughly 8.9/10 on a traditional scale) and the IMDb score (7.2) reveals an important limitation: critics and general audiences often respond differently to genre films, particularly complex science fiction narratives like this one.

Critical Reception and What The 89% Rotten Tomatoes Score Reveals

An 89% critics score from Rotten Tomatoes means that approximately nine out of ten professional reviewers recommended The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion. This represents a strong critical consensus that the film succeeds at what it attempts.

For a science fiction action thriller, an 89% score places it in genuinely acclaimed territory—it’s the kind of score associated with films that appear on year-end critic lists and generate serious discussion about genre innovation.

The film’s critical success makes sense in context: director Park Hoon-jung crafted a narrative that works simultaneously as political allegory, action spectacle, and science fiction thriller.

Critics responded to its ambition and technical execution, even when reviewers noted the film’s complexity could be challenging for mainstream audiences.

The gap between the critical score (89%) and audience score (86%) is unusually narrow, suggesting that viewers who actually watched it tended to agree with critics about its quality, even if the general audience’s engagement was slightly more measured.

Comparing Audience and Critic Scores

The 86% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes tells a meaningful story: most people who watched The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion appreciated it, but their enthusiasm was slightly more restrained than critics’.

This three-percentage-point difference is actually small enough to indicate real alignment between critics and audiences, unlike films where the gap exceeds 15 points—which often signals that critics were overenthusiastic about something audiences found tedious, or vice versa. The close alignment suggests The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion genuinely satisfied both constituencies.

However, the comparison reveals a practical limitation: audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes reflect only users who self-selected into rating the film, typically people who actively sought it out and cared enough about movies to register and review them. This creates a bias toward people who either loved or actively disliked the film.

Casual viewers who watched it casually and moved on without rating it are invisible to the score. The IMDb score’s emphasis on the film achieving 7.2 suggests that when you include a broader spectrum of viewers with varying levels of investment, the enthusiasm settles into solid-but-not-extraordinary territory—still good, but less universally passionate.

Making Sense of Multiple Ratings: A Practical Guide

For viewers trying to decide whether to watch The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion, the existence of these different scores creates useful information even in Metacritic’s absence. The Rotten Tomatoes critics score indicates that serious film people find it genuinely worthwhile.

The audience score and IMDb rating suggest it delivers entertainment value and won’t disappoint viewers seeking a solid genre film, even if it might not blow everyone away equally.

As a general principle, when critics rate something substantially higher than general audiences—even by the modest 3-point gap seen here—it often indicates the film has artistic ambition or complexity that rewards patient attention.

A practical approach: if you’re a genre enthusiast who enjoys thinking about science fiction narratives, the critical consensus strongly suggests you’ll appreciate this film. If you’re seeking straightforward entertainment without narrative complexity, the slightly lower audience scores suggest you might find it occasionally challenging, but not to the point of being off-putting.

The film’s 89% critics score provides genuine reassurance that your time won’t be wasted; this is a competent, ambitious film by a skilled director, not an experimental oddity that only critics enjoyed.

The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion in the Context of Korean Cinema

The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion released at a pivotal moment in Korean cinema’s global expansion. While Korean films have achieved substantial international success since the early 2000s, 2018 represented a period of growing international interest that would culminate in Parasite’s massive 2019-2020 success.

The film benefited from this rising tide of international curiosity about Korean genre filmmaking, which helped it achieve better Rotten Tomatoes coverage than an earlier Korean sci-fi film from, say, 2010 might have received.

Director Park Hoon-jung has become increasingly known for sophisticated science fiction storytelling, and The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion demonstrated his ability to handle complex narratives with technical precision.

The film’s critical success helped establish that Korean filmmakers could work successfully in science fiction and complex action genres, not just the crime thrillers and dramas that had dominated Korean international film discourse.

This cultural positioning matters: the film’s ratings reflect not just its individual merits but the moment in cinema history when it was released and how the critical establishment was evolving.

Finding Ratings Across Platforms Today

In 2026, finding comprehensive critical information about any film requires checking multiple platforms since no single source captures everything. For The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion specifically, checking Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, and potentially international review aggregators like CinemaScore (if available) provides a more complete picture than Metacritic could alone.

This fragmentation, while occasionally frustrating, has the advantage of preventing any single platform from having excessive editorial control over how films are perceived.

The film’s absence from Metacritic, rather than being merely an oversight, illustrates a larger evolution in how criticism and ratings circulate. Serious film audiences increasingly consult multiple sources—Letterboxd’s user rankings, IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and direct critic reviews—rather than relying on a single aggregated score. This approach actually provides richer information.

The various scores for The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion collectively tell a coherent story about a well-made, genuinely good film that works across both critical and audience contexts.

Conclusion

The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion does not have a Metacritic rating, but this absence should not deter interested viewers from understanding the film’s critical reception.

Rotten Tomatoes’ 89% critics score and 86% audience score, combined with IMDb’s 7.2/10 rating, provide robust evidence that director Park Hoon-jung successfully delivered a complex, well-executed science fiction thriller that satisfied both critical audiences and general viewers.

These ratings consistently point toward the same conclusion: this is a genuinely worthwhile film that deserves serious consideration from anyone interested in the genre.

For film enthusiasts, the lack of a Metacritic score is less important than consulting the platforms where the film actually appears.

The convergence of strong critical consensus (89%) with solid audience appreciation (86% and 7.2/10) suggests this is exactly the kind of film where reading a few individual reviews alongside these aggregate scores will provide excellent guidance for whether it matches your viewing preferences. The film’s four-year history since its 2018 release confirms its lasting appeal.

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