The Witch: A New England Folktale

            “What dost thou want from me?”

            “What canst thou give?”

            “Wouldst thou like the taste of butter, or a beautiful dress? Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”  

Robert Eggers’ first time in the director’s chair brings us The Witch (2016), a film that is perhaps the most unsettling, if not the scariest, in recent memory. Not scary in the way that The Conjuring (2013) was, mind you. This is a more deep-seated, paranoid sort of fear – an unnerving dread that settles like a fog over the entire picture that doesn’t even let up once the credits roll. It is fear as you actually feel it in real life, not the haphazard jolts and bumps in the night that one is accustomed to receiving at the local multiplex.

            The Witch centers upon a Puritan family in 1630’s New England. The father, William, is judged to be heretical by the standards of his colony, though the circumstances of this are never quite clear, and is banished to the wilderness. As a result, he must take his wife Katherine, oldest daughter Thomasin, her sibling Caleb, twins Jonas and Mercy, and newborn Samuel with him to build and live in a new farm nearly a day’s ride from town.

            Once established there, however, things take a surreal turn for the worse when baby Samuel inexplicably disappears before Thomasin’s eyes during a game of peekaboo, and a grief-stricken Katherine blames her daughter and accuses her of witchcraft…

            The Witch is not a film that is easily understood if one’s cinematic experience is limited to giant fighting robots and superheroes. It is a masterpiece of atmosphere and simplicity. Beyond the muted, natural light used to film the bleak woods and the deliberately slow-moving plot, the entirety of the dialogue is spoken in period-accurate Middle English, complete with all forms of ‘thou’ and ‘thee’. This is not Shakespeare, however, and the cast do an admirable job of speaking what nearly seems to be a foreign tongue with convincing earnest and no small amount of natural grace.

            Though the entire cast does an impressive job all around – fans of HBO’s Game of Thrones will recognize Kate Dickie as Katherine, who played Lady Lysa Stark in the series – the standout performances here come from the children. Harvey Scrimshaw steals many of his scenes as Caleb, the oldest boy in the family, but the true weight of this film rests on newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy as the teenaged oldest daughter Thomasin. Her story is slowly revealed as the center of the picture and she turns in what is certainly the finest performance of 2016.

            There are at least three distinct layers to The Witch that make it both an effectively simple film and yet a marvelously complex exploration of religious fervor, paranoia, and adolescence. Each of these layers work together simultaneously to form an interwoven story of dread where the worlds of fairy tales and history meet. And indeed, it is a fairy tale, as the subtitle A New England Folktale declares.

            The first layer is on the surface – a dogmatically puritan family in the grips of depression and isolation turns to ever-deepening religious superstition to explain their situation. When baby Samuel disappears, Katherine cannot handle it and spends days without sleep praying and weeping continuously. Even without the presence of the supernatural, this would be an effective psychological horror film. As the inexplicable events surrounding the family mount, they begin to accuse each other of witchcraft. With the darkness of the woods surrounding the farm, and the corn crop being eaten by a blight, the family becomes paranoid.

            Thomasin is accused by the younger twins Mercy and Jonas of being a witch. She knows she is not, but cannot convince her mother otherwise, while her father struggles to provide for all of them. With no one else to turn to, or blame, the family members turn on each other. Caleb earnestly asks his father if his baby brother is in Heaven or Hell, “What wrong could he hath done?” Often we hear William praying to God to save his family in spite of his own sins, but to no avail. When Katherine tells him she believes God has left them, the film seems inclined to agree.

           

The characters are so focused inward on the possible evil in their midst that they fail to notice the very real evil surrounding them. This second layer to The Witch revolves around a menacing foe lurking in the woods around the farm. We see this paranormal adversary in many different forms, including a black billygoat named ‘Black Phillip’, naked feral women, a seductress in a red cloak, and perhaps most menacingly a recurring large, brown hare. These images contribute to the overall atmosphere of unease that pervades the film.

            Early on, we may be forgiven for believing these figures exist only in the tortured dreams of the characters. By the end of this folktale though, they reveal themselves as all too real. There are many visual statements in the film that seem to suggest that evil often triumphs simply because many refuse to admit that it is there. Thomasin disregards Mercy’s claims of being able to talk with Black Phillip because she reasons that her sister is simply playing children’s games. Nevertheless, the goat somehow gets loose from its pen over and over again without explanation. By the time Thomasin, and the audience, begin to realize what is actually happening on the farm, it is too late.

            The final layer is much more discrete than the others. Mentioned only in passing by her parents in secret conversation, and in subtle visual references to her blossoming figure, Thomasin is a young teenage girl just coming of age. Her prayers are fraught with confessions of disobeying her parents, not caring about her chores, and shame of her growing body. She is becoming a young woman in a family where the very fact is considered a sin.

Caleb is confronted a number of times with his sister’s developing bosom and finds himself in a visibly distraught state of confusion. Her parents’ solution to the problem of their daughter’s puberty is to send her to live with a family in the colony so that she might be available to marry. Her burgeoning autonomy forces her, like many teenagers, into conflict with her mother and father, and it becomes easy to see that maybe the strange goings on could be somehow connected to her adolescence.

This thread of the young woman coming of age holds together both the paranoid dysfunction of the family and the supernatural evil emanating from the forest. Thomasin finds herself, through no fault of her own, the target of anger and blame for the disappearance of her baby brother, the blight destroying the crops, and even the misbehavior of the livestock. It then becomes more and more apparent that she may also be the ultimate target of whomever, or whatever, stalks the woods around the family farm.

Ultimately these three layers are woven together masterfully by Robert Eggers, a first-time director who reportedly spent nearly four years researching both the time period of his film, and the subject of witches and their craft in 17^th Century New England. All of the costuming and set design is painstakingly accurate. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find a more faithful recreation of early colony life than The Witch, which honestly makes it a pity that this film will most likely not be understood by the majority of filmgoers, or simply passed by in favor of Deadpool (2016) – a film that is funny, but The Witch is far better than – or Risen (2016) – a movie that does not explore religious devotion nearly so well as this one.

The Witch: A New England Folktale is a challenging, disturbing, beautiful film that deserves to be seen in the theatre. It is quite nearly a miracle that it has earned a wide release (one may have the unexpected success of It Follows (2015) to thank for that). However, if you don’t get around to watching it on the big screen, be sure to catch it on the small one. For those willing to brave it and take it in, this reviewer gives The Witch a 10/10.