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The Witch

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Year: 2016
Director: Robert Eggers

Might appeal to people who enjoyed:

It’s 92 minutes long so, for a start, it might appeal to people who enjoy films that aren’t tests of endurance.
That said, if you’re looking for something to cheer you up, this might not be for you..

2

Comments

  1. Ooh the review vanished. *waves wand*
    —->
    What is it that makes a horror film a horror film? A monster maybe, a procession of grisly murders perhaps, a terrifying and seemingly inescapable situation? Some horror films lull you along as a thriller or mystery before the true nature of what is happening is revealed. Others sustain a perpetual atmosphere of menace from the opening scene. The best entangle themselves in the knots of your brain, so that weeks later you find yourself mulling them over, or are chilled anew by an image you can’t seem to shake. Others are obviously just popcorn slashers for teenagers, like the ghost train at the amusement arcade, designed to provide a partner-grabbing thrill ride but then be forgotten on the way home. Film studios have long known that cheaply made horror has the most reliable cash return, hence a stigma that clings to the very word, which means there is a tendency among naysayers to reclassify the best examples as belonging to another genre altogether. (Alien: sci fi – fair enough. American Werewolf: black comedy – well, yes, up to a point. The Orphanage: psychological melodrama – methinks you protest a little too much..)
    Robert Eggers’ film The Witch has as its backdrop the very real horror of the endless thousands of women who were killed for practising witchcraft (in the closing credits, he claims to have gone to the source for much of the dialogue).
    The film opens in America, some time in the 17th century, as a man takes his family away from the security of their community of settlers, newly arrived from England, to live in isolation at the edge of a forest. Thus, pretty much the entire film is carried by the family of four children and two adults (one of whom is Finchy from The Office). The dialogue is faithful to the period – all hither and yon – and the accents are (correctly but still disconcertingly) Northern English. These are profoundly religious people in the Old Testament sense. The boy spends his day being told by his father that he is a sinner who will only find any happiness in the next life; the eldest girl, barely an adolescent, is already certain witches are real and knows that one becomes a witch by “signing The Devil’s book”.
    Theirs is a religion of fear. This is a time when people, at the mercy of nature, pray to God for successful crops and when misfortune comes they are quick to attribute it to the intervention of a demon or witch. Unlike God, impassive in the sky, the forces of evil operate at ground level employing human agents in the form of witches. As soon as things go wrong the scapegoating begins and witch paranoia means this society is not a good place to be a woman.
    In the opening scenes we see the hardship brought upon Finchy’s family by their isolation and a tragedy occurs which exacerbates their misery. As their misfortune mounts they begin to turn on one another.
    The Witch contains some truly powerful imagery, the paranoia and confusion is articulated by some crafty camerawork, placing us almost exclusively within the family and, as they start to mistrust one another the viewer becomes unsure who to trust.
    Unlike a lot of contemporary horror, the film doesn’t rely on loud bangs on the soundtrack or daft decoy scares of things jumping out of the corner of the screen.
    This film is more like The Wicker Man in the way it does a great job of isolating you in an alien, superstition-fuelled universe. And like The Wicker Man it has an ending which may surprise, but which in retrospect is made inevitable by all that precedes it.
    I’m giving it three skulls 💀💀💀

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