THE WITCH: Toil and Trouble

Director: Robert Eggers
Writer: Robert Eggers
Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson
Runtime: 92 mins
2016

I saw The Witch with a mostly full crowd. They talked, texted, and laughed through it. At the end the lights came up and people started grumbling.

"I want my money back."

"I couldn't even understand what they were saying."

"That was one of the worst movies I've ever seen."

Meanwhile my friends and I sat transfixed and slowly recovering from a soulwrenching cinematic experience. We remained shaken through dinner, and when I got home I felt uneasy turning out the lights for bed.

How could we have possibly had such a disparate experience from all the people around us?

My theory is that is has to do with expectations. When you walk into a theater knowing exactly what you want to see, more often than not your experience will be crippled. I'm guessing folks walked into The Witch expecting the next Paranormal Activity or Insidious spookfest. Weaned on a diet of millennial horror, we've come to expect horror to fit into certain boxes. Either the movie will try to get you with flashy jump scares, or it will try to horrify you with excessive gore. The truth is that few people enjoy being confronted with something new and incomprehensible to them. Movies often function as comfort food.

There is nothing comforting about The Witch, and if you walk in expecting a horror movie like anything you've seen in the past decade, you're in for a shock. The Witch has no interest in the sorts of things that scare Americans in 2016. The Witch aims for the terrors that face Americans in 1630.

The movie follows a Puritan family who have been exiled from their colony for an unspecified reason. They journey into the woods and attempt to scrape by on what they can build with their own two hands. William (Ralph Ineson) and Katherine (Kate Dickie) are the pictures of piety--that is, until their youngest child Sam is abducted by what they can only imagine to be witchcraft. The elder remaining children, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), try to hold the family together while the eerie twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson) prance around making everyone uncomfortable.

The first thing that sets The Witch apart from contemporary horror is its pacing. The film never tries to titillate its audience, and it has no patience for those whose attention will wonder. It doesn't grip its audience with constant jolts, but with an overpowering sense of atmospheric dread. The family's journey into the woods resembles Heart of Darkness with its understated pacing. The camera lingers endlessly on static shots of the overgrown woods while Mark Korven's masterful score drills into our psyche. This is punctuated by shots of the family supplicating themselves to the Lord in prayer, but the unnatural way in which they are filmed makes it seem like they are entering into a perverse covenant with the forest itself. Before anything even happens, we know that we do not want them to be anywhere near the deep unknown of the natural world.

The second thing that sets The Witch apart from contemporary horror is its language. It's a period piece, of course, and everything about its production design feels drab and authentic. This extends to the way these characters speak. Their language is flowery yet harsh, always delivered in an alien monotone that our modern ears have to work to process. The result is what feels like a window into a historical moment that is far more real to me now than it previously was in my imagination.

The third thing that sets The Witch apart from contemporary horror is that there is an honest to god witch, and the movie never even pretends to be coy about it. For whatever reason, modern horror is squeamish about fully committing to its premises. If we have a ghost story, maybe it turns out to be an unreliable protagonist with some sort of psychosis. Or maybe we are uncertain until the very end. Or it's never certain. Or it needs to be overexplained. The Witch eschews all of that in favor of showing us a real witch straightaway and emphasizing that some horrid supernatural perversion is happening to this family.

Modern audiences are so hungry for explanation and overintellectualizing because it is baked into our cultural upbringing. Logic and science are prized as more viable than intuition and spiritualism. Eggers doesn't want to tell a witch story through that lens. He wants to bring you into the fears of a seventeenth century family struggling for their eternal souls. He wants to strip away the cliches of the witch and show you why they were such powerful figures that innocent people were murdered under the guise of cleansing their society of witchcraft. He wants to reintroduce the feeling of supernatural dread that we haven't felt since we were children. He succeeds.

The witch in this story functions brilliantly in the thematic structure as a counterpart to the suffocating atmosphere of family and tyrannical piety, but unlike other horror beasties the witch does not only function as a metaphor. Much like the creature in The Babadook, the witch can mean many things, but first and foremost she is a real, physical threat in the lives of this family.

The subtitle of The Witch is "A New-England Folktale," and it very much lives up to that description. I keep coming back to the fact that not only is this a period piece, but The Witch emulates the fears of a seventeenth century colonial family in its very structure and content. I am obsessed with this because the film unsettled me in a way I've never been unsettled before. An old, primal way. Movies are the ultimate tools for building empathy, and for ninety minutes I felt absurdly connected to the hopes and fears of a family that existed four hundred years ago. When horror movies aggressively claim to be "based on true events," this is the feeling they are impotently trying to capture.

Everything about Eggers' filmmaking is jarring and uncomfortable, and I believe audiences' widespread dismissal of it comes from a place of defensiveness. If you're looking for anything close to a typical frightfest, The Witch might baffle you more than anything. But for me, movies seldom manage to scream their identity with every single frame as convincingly as The Witch.

5 / 5  BLOBS