Movie Talk - The Witch (2015)

SPOILER ALERT

The Witch (2015) is set in 17th-century colonial New England. It is written and directed by Robert Eggers in his directorial debut.

In the opening scene, a man is banished from the local settlement for unrelenting spiritual vanity. William (played by Ralph Ineson) is given multiple opportunities to back down, but he stands firm in his puritanical self-righteousness.

Thus he and his family -- his wife Katherine, his eldest daughter Thomasin (played by Anya Taylor-Joy), his eldest son Caleb, his fraternal twins Mercy and Jonas, and his infant son Samuel -- must leave the safety of the walls of the settlement to go live in a clearing surrounded by uncharted woodland.

First off this movie felt a lot longer than its 90-min running time. The camera often lingers, and the action progresses at a laborious pace. If you are a horror fan looking for excitement as in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Saw, this one might not be for you.

But, as a work of art that happens to fall into the horror genre, The Witch is superb.

In my opinion, the main role in the film is not played by any actor but by Shadows and by the Dark itself. The movie opens with an extended shot of utter darkness, and before the credits roll, it's the same. In the meantime, shadows obscure great portions of almost every shot in The Witch. They cast everything that remains visible into stark relief.

That being said, The Witch is not an abstract piece of art. There is a story to follow.

From the beginning moving forward, The Witch appears to be the story of a family's disintegration. It happens via the machinations of a "witch of the wood", and via the fault lines in their own familial interrelations.

The first unsettling thing to occur in their exile is the disappearance of Samuel, the baby boy. Eldest daughter Thomasin is babysitting him. She closes her eyes for literally a second. When she opens them, the baby is gone.

From that moment, the witch-hunt is on. And instead of casting their evil eyes outward, they turn on each other. This is a family where their devotion to Christ supercedes their loyalty to one another. Because the house is divided against itself, the witch (or actually witches) of the wood is able to dismantle their bonds, and their personal stakes in sanity too.

In the middle portion of the movie, William and Thomasin have a heated exchange over his thinking she is the witch. Thomasin calls her father a hypocrite. She accuses him of being unable to farm or hunt, of doing anything but chop wood.

That being said, there is something delicious about seeing the father William buried in a fallen heap of cut logs after he is gored by a supposedly possessed ram at the end of the movie.

By the end, when Thomasin and her mother Katherine fight to the death, and Thomasin is the last character left standing -- we can really say that the movie delivered as a "family disintegration piece."

But the movie doesn't quite end with destruction, despair, and disorder.

Once you've finished The Witch, you will see that the real thrust of the movie is the story of Thomasin's (ultra-violent) release from the puritanical mores of her forebears -- and her ecstatic rebirth into Witchery.

I will not spoil any more of the details, as I highly recommend this movie -- to anyone who is into that sort of thing.

Ciao