Movie Review: 'The Witch'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Finally, a movie that addresses the conundrum, "Which witch is which?"
In seventeenth-century New England – half-a-century before the Salem witch trials – a family sets up housekeeping in the woods and encounters what appears to be witchcraft.
That's the premise of the dread-filled drama, The Witch, an award winner at this year's Sundance Film Festival, and an unusual period horror folktale intent on creeping you out without grossing you out.
Writer-director Robert Eggers is a former costume designer and production designer whose background comes in handy as he makes this, his directorial debut.
What he has done is consult documents, journals, and legal records of the era for just about all the dialogue.
This approach certainly contributes to the film's authenticity, but does not exactly enhance its accessibility. That is, it's often difficult to hear what the characters are saying and sometimes impossible to understand their exact meaning anyway, given that they're speaking in Olde English tongue.
That said, however, Eggers has created an artful chiller, oozing atmosphere, that keeps the jump scares to a minimum and instead insinuates its way under your skin.
Fundamentalist patriarch William (Ralph Ineson), a woodcutter, and his wife, Katherine (Kate Dickie), already outsiders because they've recently arrived from England, have a religious conflict with the church leaders of their Puritan village in the 1630s and are banished from the village.
So they and their three kids pack up their things, hop in a ramshackle wagon, and set up housekeeping in an isolated, self-sustaining farm in a clearing at the edge of the woods.
Within a year, they have a house, a barn, a crop, and another child.
But the harvest is problematic, which means that therefore food and money are scarce, and that's when strange, perhaps supernatural, things begin to happen.
Their infant suddenly disappears one day while in the care of their teenage daughter, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), through whose eyes this story is told.
Then their oldest son, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), approaching puberty, gets sick.
And the young twins, Jonas (Lucas Dawson) and Mercy (Ellie Grainger), begin acting out.
You could cut the clan's despair with a knife.
Katherine, who feels she's going mad, blames Thomasin, making her the target of her understandable rage, and accuses her of being a witch.
Naturally, feeling that she's merely a scapegoat, Thomasin protests, then suffers in silence as the family comes apart at the seams.
Why is this happening to this devout, God-fearing Christian family? Are they just paranoid? Or is black magic involved? Is it possible that Thomasin is possessed? And why does the barnyard goat suddenly seem so scary, perhaps a danger to the children?
We're not completely sure which threats are real and which are imagined, but something untoward is going on, testing their faith in the face of evil.
Eggers lets the faith-versus-evil tension build slowly but surely, although perhaps a shade too deliberately. But he finds unsettling discomfort even in the most mundane scenes as the family unravels in what now seems severely bleak surroundings.
Having kept the ambiguity quotient sky-high throughout, he does offer us the privilege of an explanation at film's end, one that will not be divulged here and that will please and satisfy some viewers while frustrating and disappointing others.
Subtitled A New England Folktale, the grim The Witch gets 3 stars out of 4. It doesn't quite bewitch, but comes close enough to be a harbinger of wizardly flicks to come from its first-time director.
