The Witch
Robert Eggers
Initial release:
 |
| images c/o FanCaps |
Imagine what North America must have looked like to the early colonists. Wild, untamed, and hostile to a bunch of white people who were too weird for Europe. It must have seemed like the Devil's own country, there to be conquered but at what cost? The specter of witches, devils, and worse lurking in the deep forests make up the bedrock of American folklore; it's the grim thread throughout this country's history. Robert Eggers has made a name for himself in the past decade with a small collection of nonetheless strong arthouse horror films, and it all started here with The Witch (sometimes stylized with two Vs,) in which a tiny cast of mostly unknowns populate one of the gloomiest, most terrifying colonial folk horror movies since Eyes of Fire.
We open with with an obstinate jackass getting his family kicked out of a Puritan colony over unspecified religious differences. Leaving the village, they eventually find a nice place to live and build a farm. It doesn't go well. Things are fine at first, but soon the family’s baby son disappears into thin air. The family gradually falls apart under the stress and paranoia as more bad things happen, and the oldest daughter -- smarter than them all -- is increasingly isolated from the rest. The next-youngest children after the baby are a pair of creepy twins who frequently sing a weird song about the family goat, a huge black Baphomet-looking motherfucker who’s gotta be the most shifty-looking goat I’ve ever seen.
It’s abundantly clear
that there’s something wrong out there in the woods.
There is most definitely a witch in this film, or perhaps several;
certainly, the two daughters of the family joke about being witches
themselves, only to later accuse each other of same. I
won’t belabor my issue about the portrayal of witches, particularly as
villains, in “witch panic” stories; and anyway, it doesn’t
really matter, because as much as the witch(es) may manipulate things
from afar, the real villain here is paranoia and isolation. It’s worth
remembering that the Puritans were afraid of the wilderness and what may
lie in it, fearing that having to live distant from civilization would
lead to spiritual savagery and exposure to the devil. It's this mindset that leads to the family's ultimate ruin. The
father forbids his family from entering the woods, though he himself
goes in to hunt; bad things happen to children who enter the woods. Only
the eldest daughter, Thomasin, remains resolute, her faith the
strongest, and yet she’s the most tormented by the family’s collapse.
A friend pointed out that if this movie had been made in the late 2000s, there probably wouldn’t even have been a real witch. While the film is less than ambiguous on that point, much of the rest of the film is far more laden in meaning. Much like another famous colonial American witch story, The Crucible, there’s a political element to this film lurking beneath the dramatic surface. Stories about witches and witchcraft are always going to be stories about men’s fear of women, and women’s fear of themselves. Thomasin must endure multiple cruelties, from being accused by the twins of witchcraft, her parents turning on her (her father holds out longer than you’d expect, but even he tips over the edge,) even being blamed for her slightly younger brother’s staring at her chest.
In
the end, she’s left with nothing to lose but her chains — and perhaps
that’s the whole point. It’s a tale worthy of the gothic tradition,
taking the explicit and building ambiguities upon it. It’s a wonder
there aren’t more films like this, given how ripe the setting can be.
Sadly, horror films set in colonial America are extremely rare at best,
and often fall short of the mark; this makes The Witch
stand out all the more. The dialogue is expertly crafted (heavy
research went into making it authentic.) The camera work is fantastic,
and the editing makes great use of smash cuts (I love smash cuts!) The
music also adds heavily to the ambience, alternating between generalized
anxiety and abject horror, finally culminating in a haunting chorus
during the credits (which are done up in the style of ending credits
from the 1930s or '40s, with short lists fading in and out.) Shot in
rural Ontario, the film makes certain to use gloomy weather to create a
gloomy, oppressive atmosphere; it works. Past the opening, we see
absolutely no sign of civilization; every moment spent outside the farm
feels unsafe, and soon enough, the farm feels unsafe too.
In a great many ways, this film easily stands in the tradition of films like The Thing, with an isolated group, already on edge, completely unable to deal with threats from without or within.