FEBRUARY 20, 2016
It seems that every year or so, there comes along one horror film that transcends the genre, trading not in explicit gore, but in humanity’s most primal fears. In 2014, it was an Australian film called “The Babadook” and the deep fear held by many of motherhood. In last year’s “It Follows,” it was fear of sex. Now we have writer/director Robert Eggers’ deeply unsettling “The Witch,” opening this weekend, which effectively tackles devotion to God and the fear that He’s not listening.
It’s 1630 in a New England plantation, and it’s only been a decade since the Pilgrims first landed in Plymouth. But the faces in the town’s meeting house look as stern as Puritans, as the town chastises deeply religious William (Ralph Elison, excellent, who has the plummiest voice I’ve heard on film since the late Alan Rickman) for displaying the sin of pride. They banish William, his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) and their four (soon to be five) children to a farm a day’s ride away, just outside a forest.
Their banishment, however, does not dim their religious fervor as they gather to pray. But their faith is soon tested when their corn crops fail, and their newborn son appears to have been abducted by a wolf into the forest. Katherine is utterly distraught and blames their eldest daughter Thomasin (Alda Taylor-Joy, who’s terrific, with many of the qualities of a young Jennifer Lawrence). The family’s one surviving son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), who’s begun to have an unhealthy attraction to his elder sister’s breasts, is nonetheless Thomasin’s partner in trying to control the family’s younger bratty twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson). As the family’s religious hysteria begins to build, Mercy, resentful of being disciplined by her elder sister, accuses Thomasin of being a witch.
“The Witch,” based on a series of New England folktales of the time, is set several decades before the Salem Witch Trials, but here you can see the mindset that allowed people to think that killing those considered to be witches was the right thing to do. But for all the “thy”s and “dost”s, “The Witch” feels like a top-notch contemporary horror film.
Let’s cut to the chase. This guy, Robert Egger, is good. I mean, Best-Director-at-the-Oscars-in-10-years good. His background is as an art director, most notably on “Sesame Street,” but you wouldn’t know it by the very adult set direction here. From a distance, the farm to which the family flees is picture perfect, with smoke curling from the chimney and the animals forming a picturesque menagerie. But when you get closer, the farmhouse is a claustrophobic mess, and the animals (particularly a goat named Black Phillip) are threatening at every turn.
“The Witch” is not a “boo!” horror movie. It’s creepy rather than scary, with fleeting shadows and unrecognizable sounds substituting for deformed slashers around every corner. And like other creepy movies such as Robert Wise’s “The Haunting” and John Carpenter’s “Halloween,” the gore factor is minimal (at least here until the last 15 minutes). The horror is all in your mind, and, at least for me, that’s the best kind of horror movie.
If you’ve already seen the Oscar contenders and/or “Deadpool,” I’d ask you to consider “The Witch” this weekend, even if you’re horror-averse. I will guarantee it will give you a lot to talk about on the ride home.
GRADE: B+
