In 2015, Robert Eggers directorial debut The Witch premiered at Sundance Film Festival to wide critical acclaim. It was widely released a year afterwards, and although it garnered generally favorable reviews from the critics, audiences had a more negative response to it, mainly because the movie was marketed as a traditional horror movie, combining the very few jump scares and fantastical elements that are shown all throughout its runtime into one short trailer, which has proven time and time again to only set the viewer up for disappointment. However, The Witch is in fact a horror film, only it relies heavily on the general atmosphere, and inner conflicts of its characters to reach its premeditated and truly horrific climax.
Set in 1630s New England, a family of Puritan settlers is cast away from their plantation due to the father’s arrogance. They move out to a secluded farm near the woods, where they presume their normal everyday roles. One day as the eldest daughter Thomasin (Anya- Taylor Joy) is watching her baby brother Samuel, the boy mysteriously vanishes. This leads to tension between the mother Katherine (Kate Dickie) and her husband William (Ralph Ineson), as she blames him for not baptizing the child, and according to their beliefs, his eternal damnation. Sam’s disappearance affects other members of the family as well; Thomasin is left to deal with the resentment of her mother, while the older brother Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) struggles with the idea of Sam’s damnation as well as his puberty and lustful thoughts about his sister. In the meantime, as almost all the family members are distraught and lost in their thoughts, the youngest members, the twins Mercy and Jonas, are talking of witches and speaking goats, and the evil forces that reside in the woods.
The film is presented as a New England Folk Tale, and it achieves that in every sense of the word. It does not aspire to be a modern day allegory; in fact it thrives in its accurate representation of the period it is set in. Eggers spent five years doing the research for his film, and the dedication and effort he poured into it show in every single frame of the movie; from the sets and costumes, to the old English dialect and the outlandish script. With its ultra-realistic representation of its characters, the film allows the viewer to tap into their mindset and fears, and ultimately understand their rationale for believing in the witch of the woods. Communicating with the devil in the form of a goat, destroying crops, and seducing men are all real accusations that were historically used against women of that period to prove they were witches, and viewed from our modern day perspective, they sound ludicrous as they can be scientifically explained with ease, yet in constructing an early 17th century farmer’s perspective on screen, it does not seem hard to understand why witches are a much simpler answer.
Finally, this film is my favorite of the list of witch movies I put up for this series of articles. It is moody and chilling; its cinematography is mesmerizing and captures the vastness of the woods that encompasses the family farm. The soundtrack matches the tone of the film and the performances are all incredible, but above all the accuracy that goes into portraying what a witch was in the consciousness of the people who lived at the time, truly elevates this film to be a folk tale commemorated on screen forever.
In The Mood for Films 