by Ed Travis
The witch as a horror icon has long since been rendered a toothless caricature; from a green-faced, pointed-hat broom rider to CGI fodder for Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters’ steampunk arsenal. Writer/Director Robert Eggers single-handedly restores the power of the witch to insight fear and dread in an audience, and in the process creates one of this generation’s very greatest horror films.
IMDb Storyline
New England, 1630: William and Katherine lead a devout Christian life, homesteading on the edge of an impassible wilderness, with five children. When their newborn son mysteriously vanishes and their crops fail, the family begins to turn on one another. ‘The Witch’ is a chilling portrait of a family unraveling within their own fears and anxieties, leaving them prey for an inescapable evil.
Using research from the time period, and crafting dialog inspired by the linguistic style he found in source materials, Eggers meticulously re-creates a period setting for his tale, including the centrality of religion to the lives of the early colonists. And in taking the religion of his characters entirely seriously, and melding it with the harsh reality of their hard-scrabble existence, Eggers is able to restore the visceral power of a supernatural witch as a genuine threat that inspires such dread as to make one’s skin crawl.
The Witch focuses on a family without any verbalized surname, a family who are unquestionably believers in the faith. So dogmatic is the father William, (Ralph Ineson with perhaps the most gravelly voice in cinema history) that he chooses to defy the church in a theological disagreement and is forced out of the colony as a result. What Eggers does here is to set a story amidst some of the most basic, primal human terrors; terrors so elemental that we often glance right past them or take them for granted. Human beings fear the unknown, something which religion promises to assuage with answers beyond our knowing. Human beings also cannot tolerate isolation, which is another core element that religion offers to adherents: a community in which to belong. The bold confidence that comes from feeling a certainty about the unknown, and having a community in which to belong and re-affirm your beliefs, is a truly tempting way to live in order to push those elemental fears we all share to the background. And while our family in The Witch cling desperately to the eternal truths of their religion in order to find solace when an outside force begins to assail them, their isolation is abject, and leaves them vulnerable.
It doesn’t help our main characters that, while Eggers takes great care to portray 16th century faith accurately, he makes no effort to give any signs that the God our characters pray to is responsive in any way. And unfortunately for them, the very present witch of the woods seems interested in actively engaging with them, so to speak.
And so, through portraying some of the base needs that religion fills for us accurately, and then stripping many of those comforts away from our protagonists, Eggers places his characters and his audience in an extremely vulnerable state. Stripped of any security, the witch in the woods carries out horror after horror upon Tomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy as the eldest daughter, in a breakout performance) and her family, and provokes dread-filled responses from the audience as well.
The Witch is visually resplendent, aurally meticulous, and singularly crafted to evoke dread from opening to close. Eggers does the impossible with his debut film, which is to craft a horror tale so fantastic that it ups the bar for the entire genre and stakes its claim among the very greatest horror cinema has to offer. Probably not since The Exorcist has a religious horror film cut so deeply to the core of the faith and simultaneously restored a healthy fear of the supernatural unknown.
It is perhaps possible that one’s own approach to religion will have an impact on how deeply The Witch affects them. For those without any attachment or experience with Christianity in their daily lives, perhaps The Witch won’t connect as personally or feel as uncomfortable (though through filmmaking craft alone Eggers has still created something spectacular). As someone who claims belief myself, but who has a rocky relationship with the established church of my time, I connected with the plight of this family deeply; a family earnestly trying to seek the truth, but struggling to connect with their community and often hearing only silence when they pray. But in The Witch, when that silence is broken, it is in the most skin-crawling and terrifying way imaginable.
Rarely has a horror film so effectively built its world so as to lure the viewer in and captivate them from start to finish the way The Witch does. It is such an elemental horror that many will reject it outright as cinema to be scared of. (Which it is). But many will heed the call and have a dread-soaked cinematic experience that has the power to genuinely alter them as it did me.
And I’m Out.