A cinematic slow burn is one difficult task to achieve for any filmmaker. When done effectively, the payoff is enormous. Building the suspense and/or fear over the course of two hours until a horrific jaw-dropping conclusion is something that is rarely achieved in pure perfection. Writer-director Robert Eggers’ The Witch has arrived and it is about as perfect of an example of how to achieve that storytelling feat than anything we’ve seen in some time.
The Witch is a horror movie that is the one horror movie non-horror movie fans should see this year– or any year for that matter. It is haunting in the most subtle of ways and scary as all hell in the best of ways.
Eggers tells his story of a 1600s puritan Massachusetts family. They are tossed from their village for being too religious, sending the farmer (Ralph Ineson), his wife (Kate Dickie) and their four kids out into the New England wilderness. When the oldest daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) is out watching the baby, it suddenly disappears in a game of peek-a-boo gone wrong. The family blames their teenage girl for the loss. Despair, suspicion and the most delightfully understated of supernatural events start to envelop this family as they try to make a life all alone in the wild of the wilderness.
Is Thomasin a witch, as her two younger siblings assert? Or are they merely being little devils and planting seeds in their parents’ collective heads that only stir this pot of paranoia and accusation?
With audiences’ background knowledge of the events of Salem permeating your mind, but never mentioned in the film itself (this story takes place well before the witch trials), the viewer’s imagination is left to run rampant. And for a horror film, that is infinitely more scary than and a visual front-and-center shock and awe of terror.
The woods beyond the family’s homestead lies in the background, like a living breathing haunting machine. As anyone who has been camping can attest, the silence of the outdoors can have a field day with your imagination. Given that there is something amuck happening here, in The Witch both the family and the moviegoer engages in a subconscious searing of the unknown. And it is terrifying. Slowly, but surely, Eggers paints a picture on a canvas of accusation and authenticity that feels so real. Rarely have we seen a film that puts you in the middle of the eerie events with such slight of hand. Before you know it, the film goer is knee deep in the devil’s work and there is no turning back. Although frenzied and frightened, you will want to forge ahead until this terror tale reveals its conclusion.
No spoilers here, but that end is electric and sensationally satisfying.
One could go deeper with The Witch on many fronts. It is not necessarily a horror film that will have you losing sleep in fear. No, its scares are much more subconscious. It is also fascinating that this ultra-religious family is spurred from a group of New World immigrants, who in turn left England for religious freedom. The family was too religious for their fellow villagers. Now, all alone in the wilds, their faith is being challenged in the most devilish of ways. Whether in those early New England settler days or when Americans headed west two centuries later, the family core was what separated those who made it and those who perished. With nothing but your kin to support you, bonding together was key to survival. Once the family in The Witch started turning on each other, the seeds of their demise were sewn.
Film schools should study this film as any “slow burn” cinematic experience could learn from its mastery. Whether it romance, thrills or chills – the creeps up on you plot method is perfectly executed in its purest form in The Witch.
With The Witch, Eggers has announced himself as an auteur force of nature. His command of the visual, the textual and the timelessness of “the scare” is mesmerizing. He has cast his film brilliantly, as all involved more than do their part to bring this puritanical play to life. Eggers’ partner in crime here is cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, who has taken the barren landscape of early 1600s Massachusetts and visually had it seep into our mind and from there, the horror has you and will never let you go.
Grade: A