Movie Review—The Witch

The Witch

by Peter J. O'Connell

The Witch. Released: Feb. 2016. Runtime: 92 mins. MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violent content and graphic nudity. 

Ever since Henry James' classic novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), many connoisseurs of horror tales have felt that the best are those that maintain ambiguity as to the nature of any apparitions experienced by the characters. Are the apparitions real supernatural entities, ghosts, demons or whatever? Are they stagings by some plotter? Are they psychological projections of some inner state or states of the person or persons experiencing them? Are they symbolic, the author/auteur's way of representing some state or situation in which the characters exist?

The Witch, written and directed by Robert Eggers, is a low-budget film but one rich in ambiguity. Based on actual accounts in dairies, memoirs and transcripts from 17th-century New England, the film is both a horror story and a historical story. In fact, the horror is found in the history, the history of the stresses that early Puritan pioneers had to deal with as they attempted to eke out a living on the edge of forests that they saw as containing menacing forces—savage Indians or . . . . 

One such pioneer is William (Ralph Ineson), intensely Calvinist but expelled from a settlement. William has established a hardscrabble farm in an isolated, wilderness area. The Puritan patriarch works the farm with his entire family: wife Katherine (Kate Dickie); adolescent daughter Thomasin; son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw—great name!), just entering puberty; young twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson); and baby Samuel. The animals on the farm include a rather rowdy black goat named Black Phillip. 

The farm's crops are doing poorly, and tensions of various kinds are starting to divide the family. Baby Samuel disappears mysteriously. Caleb starts looking too long—and longingly—at Thomasin's modest cleavage and either has or imagines having a rendezvous with a woman in the woods who is either young and alluring or old and haggard—or both. Thomasin is accused by William of having an “unholy bond” with Black Phillip and by the twins, who have fits, with being a witch. Thomasin plays along with the accusations, and William and Katherine discus giving her to another family as a servant.

When a death occurs in the family, the tensions explode in horrific violence. All along the woods have exerted both a forbidding and a seductive influence on the family. At the movie's climax, the survivor of the family goes into the woods and joins some folks—or phantoms—there and appears to have acquired an ability that is one of the great symbols of freedom and empowerment, one ascribed to witches, whom Puritans feared and loathed, and some contemporary feminists and “pagans” profess to admire. 

The Witch's period details are exact. Even the dialogue is done in the way that 17th-century Puritans spoke, done to an extent that some in the audience might wish that there were subtitles. The film's palette is mostly appropriately gray, except that there is a touch of color when folks are together around a fire, whether inside or outside. The brilliant score by Mark Korven is, however, modernist and dissonant. The acting is exactly right, particularly by the lovely Anya Taylor-Joy (a star is born!). Overall, The Witch, subtitled “a New England folktale,” bears comparison with some of Hawthorne's stories as a probing of the “New England mind.”