The Witch

I was walking around my home late last night, and as I walked past the open door of my bedroom, I stopped. Looking in, there was nothing but pitch-black darkness. In that moment, the very room that I know so well was filled with a sharp sense of dread.

It was so quiet. I didn’t realize how quiet it was until that very moment. And that moment lasted for an eternity in my mind.

I was afraid.

I quickly turned the lights on, to find nothing more than my bedroom in its normal state. The cat gave me an annoyed, blinky-eyed look, as if to say “how dare you disturb my slumber.” I immediately felt relieved, and stupid. But I wasn’t turning the lights off. Not because I though something would magically happen if I did, but because that feeling of dread and fear remained.

Why was I still afraid? Nothing was going to happen; I knew that. But this wasn’t a normal fear. It was something primal. Something that’s in all of us from the days our imagination allows.  And I began asking those familiar questions.

“What am I going to see?”
“What am I going to hear?”
“What’s going to happen to me?”

I blame all of this on Robert Eggers and his new film, The Witch, because there are images, sounds, and feelings in his film, that tapped into the part of my mind that tells me, “I’m not safe.” His “New England Folk Tale,” as it’s labeled, is a horror film without jump scares, without an abundance of gore (though when there is blood, it’s gruesome), and without boundaries. What it does have, is an overall feeling of dread and impending doom that I can’t remember experiencing in a horror film for a long time.

The film begins in the year 1630 (roughly 60 years before the Salem witch trials), with a family standing before a court to answer for some instance of blasphemy. The father (Ralph Ineson) chastises the court as unfit Christians and gladly accepts a banishment from the town. He, his wife, teenage daughter, adolescent son, two younger twins, and a newborn, set out to find a suitable place to build their new home. They find it in an area bordering a vast and thick forest. They intend to grow their own crops and live a pure Christian life.

Then the infant disappears.

This incident begins a chain of events that walks the line of the surreal. Eggers does such a wonderful job of grounding the film so completely in its own snapshot in time, that when the impossible happens, it doesn’t seem impossible at all. Making it all the more terrifying.

Just as impressive is how the family slowly descends into hopeless insanity; turning on each other in ways that…well, I couldn’t even blame them. I was expecting the characters to begin to point their fingers at each other, especially with what Christians would do to anyone suspected of witchcraft in those days. But the film makes their decisions almost appropriate for how to deal with what was transpiring.

Credit goes to the people in front of and behind the camera for taking me out of a movie theater, and putting me in a place I never want to go to again. Ineson, as the father, just has the best face and most commanding voice; he’s a proud man, and truly loves his family, making his descent into madness a painful one. His wife, played by Kate Dickie (a fellow Game of Thrones alum with Ineson), is quite good at playing a grieving crazy person, but her character has good reasons, so she inspires sympathy. The child performances are the true revelation here. Ellie Granger and Lucas Dawson, as the young twins with a talent for understanding Black Phillip, the family’s black goat, seem like real children instead of actors in a horror movie. Harvey Scrimshaw as Caleb, the adolescent boy, underplayed a few scenes, but when he’s called on to nail a moment late in the film, he does it stride. It’s a scene that I doubt most actors could pull off.

The best performance in the film goes to Anya Taylor-Joy as Thomasin, the eldest daughter. Between the range of emotions and, simply, the sheer content that she has to handle, it’s a remarkable performance. One that if this film were out later in the year, could garner serious awards consideration.

That’s not all that this film could pick up awards for; the cinematography, score, and editing, are all as good as it gets. Long shots of the gloomy landscape and ominous woods force the audience to search for something they hope isn’t there. Not to mention when darkness fills the frame and you wait, and wait, with dread, for something to appear.

Now this film isn’t for everyone. Most of today’s short attention spanned audience will not be able to see past the slow pace (I admit the film was glacially slow in its first half-hour), or the old-English dialogue, that has already drawn complaints. The language was apparently taken from actual accounts of that time period, lending to the film’s authenticity. But people will dismiss it with a firm “I couldn’t understand it.” That’s because those individuals lack the capability to see past the hashtags on their cell phones. Still, anyone looking for a typical horror film, will not find it here. And they will be severely disappointed.

I wasn’t though; I was disturbed. When the credits rolled, I stayed in my seat, and felt like I needed to shake my mind away from what I had just witnessed before heading out into the world. Most impressive though, is that the film followed me from the theater. It was in my darkened bedroom. It’s in my mind right now. And I’ll see it in my nightmares.

The Witch will end up on my top ten list at the end of the year. Right now, it’s the an early best of 2016.

Grade: A