The Witch
Director: Robert
Eggers
Writer: Robert
Eggers
Starring: Anya
Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie
Grainger, Lucas Dawson, Bathsheba Garnett
Rating: Four and a
half stars out of five
Available in
theaters now
The Witch gets
it. It lives and breathes the best practices of visual filmmaking and
puts them into motion with purpose, feeling, and multilayered meaning
as it explores the breakdown of a family wracked with dysfunction.
Each character is served with complete, affecting arcs that capture
in excruciating detail the feeling of their respective places in a
cruel world.
This
“New England folk tale” is exquisite in the way it synthesizes
the superstitions, hangups, and anxieties of the colonial settlers in
the 1600s. It often uses their own written words to inform the
dialogue and situations presented within the story of a family driven
from their religious settlement in the new world for ever-expanding
and sanctimonious litmus tests of devoutness. The family patriarch,
William (Ralph Ineson), is a mess of a human being, the type of man
who compounds his troubles by doubling down on mistake after mistake
until he achieves total ruin. His family did little or nothing to
deserve being dismissed from their community. It is purely his fault,
for he can't help but see slights and transgressions from the cause
of God in everything he encounters. To him, salvation is perennially
around the corner, despite every piece of evidence to the contrary.
Writer-director
Robert Eggers, making his feature debut, uses William's arc to give
the lie to the American myth of the completely self-sufficient man.
William is a person of few gifts and he deludes himself into a belief
he can and will handle every problem that comes his way. But the
family's new house in the middle of nowhere would best be described
as a rickety shambles, with a half-finished addition and an animal
pen that looks like it was designed and built by an absentminded
child. Their corn crop is failing. He has no aptitude for hunting.
But he sure can chop wood for fires, so he spends too much time doing
that to make himself feel important. Those piles of cut logs do
nothing to change the fact that winter is on its way and he has no
plan to feed his family.
Luckily
for William's incompetent self, that family begins to dwindle. Eldest
daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy, asserting herself as a performer
of great depth) is charged with caring for her infant brother in the
cornfield one afternoon. She plays a game of peekaboo with the baby,
only to discover after covering her eyes one time too many that the
baby has disappeared. The rhythms Eggers and editor Louise Ford build
in this sequence cue the viewers' hearts to speed up as Taylor-Joy's
eyes, in a tight close-up, flicker in recognition that something
terrible has happened. The dawning realization that she is
vulnerable, alone against a threat neither she nor the audience can
see is thrilling and unnerving.
The
abduction of her baby brother places Thomasin firmly in the film's
moral center. Her mother, played by Game of Thrones'
Kate Dickie, already a broken women from her husband's never-ending
pursuit of religious purity, hollows out completely at the loss of
her youngest child. Thomasin is a sensible young woman, able to keep
her wits about her even as the world around her burns. The
responsibility she feels for her siblings is doubly remarkable given
the hormonal shift her body is taking as she begins puberty, a
seismic event within herself that the film masterfully manifests in
physical form time and again thanks to the supernatural threats posed
by their new environment. Blood follows her wherever she goes – her
cow milking chore turns into demonic bout of possession as the udder
shoots red liquid – as a specter of her changing body and her
newfound position as a possible money-making object for her father,
who sees her as ripe for selling off into a marriage at the earliest
opportunity.
Thomasin's
brother, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), has his own puberty to contend
with, but his is a more troubling sort. Segregated from any
possibility of a healthy connection with humanity, Caleb is the
ironic counterpoint to William's – and, by extension,
fundamentalist religion's – quest for perfection in mind and deed.
There is goodness within him, like his desire to fudge the truth for
his mother's peace of mind, but his urges for and stolen glances at
his older sister have the makings of something tragic.
As he
does with every character, Eggers brilliantly marries theme, plot,
and character to capture Caleb's interior and exterior journeys with
metaphorical cinematic language. Caleb's encounter with the witch of
the film's title is everything one expects a heterosexual pubescent
boy to fantasize about. She is alluring, scantily clad, a curvy
beauty who offers him the attention he craves. Of course it's a cruel
ruse played on a boy by a world that never fails to punish its
inhabitants for their desires.
Some
people are able to bend to that world, and Thomasin is one of them.
Her realistic pragmatism puts her on a frightening journey. It is a
long, painful break from the only family she has ever known, into a
place where she may have a say in how she lives her life. By doing
this, The Witch rejects
rigidity of mind and especially the forceful imposition of that
rigidity, completing an arc toward rebellion and choice, even if
those things can also lead to dangerous places. With immaculate
execution of that theme by its director, crew, and cast, it becomes
great.
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