It’s hard to be a horror movie lover. For many the genre is a guilty pleasure that most audiences publicly express disgust with, and to say the critical community usually sports Jason Voorhees-sized knives when crafting their cutting reviews is an understatement. Weaned on Cronenberg, Carpenter and many others, I’ve long defended it as being every bit as probing, diverse and smart as any other category of cinematic storytelling, yet like fellow fans I find the best defenses of most horror films to amount to things like “the monster was cool even though the acting is terrible” or “that one scene is great, if you can get through the first 40 minutes and ignore the idiotic ending.” Having a well reviewed entry come out, one that sweeps through festivals with universal praise and is immediately acknowledged as a chilling classic can be a rare treat, one the world received in 2015 with David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows. Almost exactly one year later, Robert Eggers’ The Witch hits wide release with similar lofty goals, and it achieves them through a brutal, relentlessly dark descent.
The Witch works as something like a companion piece to Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu’s The Revenant, as early European settlers in each find constant danger in the beauty of a young America. While the latter is concerned with man pitted against nature and indigenous inhabitants, the former throws man into the ring with pure evil itself, and the fight feels overwhelming, unfair and lost from the beginning. We first meet William and his family as they are about to be banished from their settlement, with the patriarch making it clear that he finds this collective to lack the proper amount of faith to justify their flight from England. He’s a deeply principled Christian who is unknowingly driving his family directly into the belly of the beast as their wagon ventures into the untamed forest for a supposedly more spiritual existence. Soon after we are introduced to the witch herself, who bolsters her powers with a ritual that gives the audience a dreadful precedent to base our expectations on how the rest of this journey for William’s family will play out. No friendly Wiccan here; this conception is, as promised at the beginning of the film, a folklore driven nightmare. As is absolutely necessary in successful horror, we are fed a bitter balance between unsettling suggestion and horrid imagery, served here with stately framing and flawless natural lighting plus the requisite swelling score when things are about to go bad, which is to say regularly. Eggers is a first time writer/director who swaggers cruelly and confidently into the job like the jaw dropping third act character cameo of the denoument, seemingly born to craft this compelling and thoroughly awful tale.
Oddly, The Witch is as much about the internal disintegration of a sympathetic family unit as it is a scare-the-audience horror film, and its success on all fronts falls both to the filmmaker and the cast. Ralph Inseon’s William is surprisingly relatable as a man trying to do the best for his family, albeit by 1630s Calvinist standards; his wife Katherine, played by Kate Dickie, would do anything for her children, if only she knew of anything that would actually help them. Son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) strives to please his father and live up to his ideals while trying to deal with his burgeoning sexuality in a literal and figurative wilderness, and young Mercy and Jonas, given great child actor turns by Ellie Grainger and Lucas Dawson, simply try to be naturally exuberant children in the midst of a barren existence that promises nothing but peril. Then there is Thomasin, the oldest daughter of William’s family whose burgeoning womanhood, a familiar and dangerous theme in horror, forms something of a backbone to the proceedings. Anya Taylor-Joy takes this central role and runs with it, all the way to the campfire-kissed pitch black ending. The march toward said finale has an increasingly bloody inevitability to it. This family simply isn’t equipped with anything approaching the tools to defend themselves; a central scene where they vainly flail about to make plans to escape and try to save one of their own exemplifies how helpless they truly are. Apologies for being intentionally vague, but the “pleasures” of The Witch are best experienced firsthand. This film boldly lives up to its hype, a modern horror masterpiece that will linger in your dreams like a curse.
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