Movie Review: The Witch

In The Witch, evangelical colonials move to the woods in the hopes of getting closer to God. They meet the other guy instead.

Sinister, whispering goats. Bloody cow milk. Broken eggs containing baby bird corpses. The farm from Robert Eggers’ directorial debut The Witch has its problems, to put it mildly, and that’s just listing the animal-related curiosities. What do you even say about the children who go missing, or worse, return possessed by an otherworldly spirit? I do not hold high hopes for the resale value of this place.

That’s the setting of his hugely disquieting horror flick. Its era? The 1600s. (Though, if you had to guess both solely on the religious fervour of its characters, you might place it at a 2016 Ted Cruz rally.)

It begins with William (Ralph Ineson), a Puritan patriarch, denouncing his community of fellow Christians in early America for straying from their religious values. He publicly accepts banishment on account of his sinful pride and whisks his family – including wife Katherine (Kate Dickie), eldest daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), hopelessly-lustful teen Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), trouble-making twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson), and baby Samuel – to the fringes of New England’s woods.

There, they’ll grow corn and grow closer to God, in near isolation. ‘Near’ isolation, because something else is living close enough to steal Samuel out from under Thomasin’s watch. As the wooded weirdness continues and demonic demonstrations accumulate, the ‘witch’ word is finally levelled at the newly-pubescent Thomasin, and the family disintegrates in a fit of paranoia and ceremonial self-sabotage (which is how one might describe a 2016 Donald Trump rally).

The Witch’s subtitle reads “A New England Folktale”, however two other F words deserve a mention: fundamentalism and feminism. It’s a searing critique of the first and a ferocious demand for the second.

Writer-director Eggers makes no bones about his disdain for blind faith here, even in the face of actual satanic manipulation (suggesting that it’s precisely among fundamentalists that evil can be concocted and perpetrated in its most covert guise). As a parable about a family ruined and driven mad by their piousness, The Witch is bitter and unrelenting. It’s to the credit of Ineson and Dickie they can portray such extremists as real, human and relatable, if not exactly tethered to sanity.

Newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy carries the weight of The Witch’s feminist subtext delicately. Only recently made aware of her body and unsure how to deploy it, Thomasin finds herself at the mercy of her father (who wants to sell her to a suitor), mother (who has grown suspicious of Thomasin), brother (who objectifies and condescends to her) and twin siblings (who flat-out accuse her of devil worship). Powerless, particularly as the blame comes flying in, she claims her independence in alarming fashion. Let’s just say The Witch has a novel new take on female empowerment.

Which is all well and good. The question punters really want to know is, will The Witch make viewers yelp in terror? To paraphrase The Simpsons: short answer ‘yes with an if’, long answer ‘no with a but’.

We’re in the midst of a new horror boom, thanks to indies The Babadook, It Follows and now The Witch. How do we categorise these films that creep and crawl towards their upsetting, nightmarish conclusions, without relying on jump scares and cheap thrills (though all three have a few of those too)?

As you’ll find from exasperated comments beneath glowing reviews of those pictures, there’s a war going on for the heart of horror cinema, with some genre fans seeking only quick and nasty fatalities (and yes, those can be exhilarating in their own grisly way). If you're wondering whether or not The Witch will scratch your own particular, specific itch, you have to ask what it is you truly want.

Do you want to be scared in a cinema, or outside of it? (The Final Destinations don’t linger beyond the theatre doors. The Witch does.) Do you want to be toyed with and tricked into screaming, or do you want to be haunted? And what do you find scarier: being frightened in the dark of a cinema, or finding yourself still disturbed when the lights come back on?

Eggers - aided by Jarin Blaschke’s grim, patient, nerve-jangling cinematography and the discordant bowed-string score by Mark Korven – has made an artful movie with a message, but one that undeniably earns its place in this genre.

The Witch’s scares are plentiful; it’s just that many of them come after, once you’re alone with your thoughts, and its disturbing images suddenly return to mind.

The closing credits only cap the horror; they do not end it.

4.5/5

In cinemas now. Rated MA 15+ for strong supernatural themes and violence.