The Witch

Release Date: February 19th, 2016

Director: Robert Eggers | MPAA Rating: R | LeavittLens Rating: 8/10

To kick off my 2023 “scary season,” I decided to travel back in time: not only to 2016 to revisit Robert Eggers‘ debut feature, The Witch, but also to 17th century New England, the setting of the film. Using the language of time traveling, in this case, feels particularly apt: though we’ve yet to develop the technology to do so, the set and costume design, writing, acting, and general mythos-making of Eggers and the entire crew ultimately achieves a transportive texture that few modern films manage to accomplish. Indeed, Eggers has, in the years since the release of The Witch, become famous for his laborious research into the eras in which his films are set. For The Witch, this meant reading as much as he could on Puritan history and its relationship to witchcraft; for The Lighthouse, he dug into the lore of 19th century seafaring, from mermaids and lapels to literature and the occult, and he chose to shoot it in black and white, in a 1:19:1 aspect ratio, creating an old-timey feel that is intentionally limited in its scope; for The Northman, gritty medieval Icelandic life is recreated from intensive study of surviving literature from the day, complete with its own mythological elements. Across his short but effective filmography, Eggers seems intent on making the tragic and twisted parts of human history not only accessible to the modern filmgoer, but also somehow compellingly repelling, connecting his historiography to the numinous darkness of many of our spiritual and metaphysical stories. He has become, in many ways, a third Grimm brother: a modern fairy-tale teller who forges invitations at once haunting and engrossing, tapping into the terrifying mystery of our spiritual and material existence. And in its perfectly compact ninety-minute runtime, The Witch is the foundation of all that Eggers has grown to embrace: an atmospheric nightmare that slowly draws you into its dread, all the while spinning a myriad of themes together on sin, patriarchy, spiritual powers, and so much more.

Set in 1630, the film introduces us to a Puritan family who has recently made the long journey from England to the “New World” (only new to these colonizers) and is now on trial before a council of Puritan leaders. While the patriarch of the family, William (played by Ralph Ineson, who possess perhaps the greatest voice in Hollywood), is accused of “prideful conceit,” we never get too much more detail on the issue. Despite a passionate defense, with an appeal towards his “proper dispensation of the Gospels,” William and his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) are excommunicated from their safe settlement and forced into the wilderness. The final shot of the large, heavy wooden gates closing behind the family as they wagon their way out of town is a perfect visual metaphor, both for the feeling of banishment and condemnation that religious legalism so often prompts, but also for a starker reality: they have left spiritual safety behind.

Eventually the family settles onto a plot of land that backs right up to the edge of a dark and ominous forest. While such New England wilderness could be pitched as pastoral beauty, Eggers’ cinematographic partner Jarin Blaschke paints the film in a blanket of gray, absent of the vibrancy and peace that such serene locations might otherwise promote. This is only reiterated by Mark Korven‘s haunting score, which hovers over the film like a dark spirit of its own. It is upon arrival at their new home that we get to know the other members of the family more closely: their eldest daughter, Thomasin (in a star-making performance from a young Anya Taylor-Joy), becomes a sympathetic protagonist through much of the film, though never at the expense of a compelling storyline playing out through her younger brother, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw). Two twins, Jonas and Mercy (Lucas Dawson and Ellie Grainger, respectively) and an infant son, Samuel (Axton Henry Dube), round out the family, and it takes all of a few minutes of screentime for their arrival to turn sour.

Samuel is soon snatched out from under Thomasin’s watchful eye, a disappearance that–both as it is depicted on screen and in Thomasin’s own imagination–seems only supernaturally possible. The film leaves little doubt in our minds as to the source of the disappearance: we soon cut to a darkened montage of terrible rites being performed by a nearly unhuman female form, from pounding a red paste within a hollowed out and rotten tree trunk to some terrible ritual of smearing blood across her body. Rather than hiding the monster throughout its runtime (the famed strategy of such classics as Jaws or The Thing), the enemy of this forest is made clear from the outset, which only demands further dread as the film continues: from the beginning we know the merciless and supernaturally evil force we are dealing with, and so we are simply awaiting the next terrible encounter.

And indeed, terror comes in escalating extremity, eventually prompting religious paranoia and chaos in this Puritan family. It’s actually in this middle section of the film that The Witch separates itself from other run-of-the-mill horror flicks, as it investigates the internal politics of 17th century religious family structures. Thomasin is the primary vehicle through which these tensions are explored: as a young girl who has recently hit puberty and is coming of age, her horror extends well beyond the woods. Given the lack of consistent sustenance the family has been able to muster here, away from their prior community, William and Katherine begin to discuss the possibility of giving Thomasin away to some suitor, using her brideprice to help pay for the raising of their other children. More than this, her presence during Samuel’s disappearance sparks a friction between herself and her mother, leading to implicit and explicit blame in response to grief and loss. The film, read in light of its eventual ambiguous ending, thus allows for a multitude of feminist interpretations, either as a testament to to the self-empowered woman who frees herself from the shackles of corrupt patriarchal religion and expectation (as The Satanic Temple has recently claimed), or as a tragedy of the trauma and lack of choices left for women trapped in such abusive, fundamentalistic spaces. Regardless of where one lands on such interpretations, the film seems intentionally ambiguous: while the religious framework central to the film certainly prompts its level of problems, the devil-worshipping life of witchcraft is not favorably seen as a liberating escape.

This sort of nuanced thematic exploration is not limited to Thomasin’s experience, either. The film seems intent on exploring the ways in which religious frameworks try to make sense out of seemingly senseless suffering: what do the faithful do when their faithfulness leads them only more deeply into horror and ruin? And more than this: in the mind of 17th century Puritanism, what role does spiritual evil play in everyday physical encounters, down even to rabbits and goats? Such spiritual inquiries also provide fertile ground to explore a multitude of complex human personalities and relationships; insecurities get revealed, relationships become exposed, and downright unhealth is unearthed in the family as the terror steadily amplifies. In this sense, the horror of the film isn’t only supernatural; it is deeply connected to the very natural parts of our humanity. Eggers’ work here expertly shows how–in the world of the film–Satan shrewdly sparks terror through the wounds and traumas humans inflict upon one another, and his evil is as evident in the division of a family as it is in the prototypical possessions and temptations.

This is precisely what makes The Witch such a standout: it doesn’t settle for common cheap tricks and jump scares, attempting to display the supernatural in a single-minded way to a modern audience who remain outsiders to such realities in their own contemporary, day-to-day life. Instead it forces the audience not only into the world of its subjects, but into their minds, creating a point of view that prompts a vicarious experience. We live into the darkness ourselves, descending ever so methodically into the same assumptions that guide the characters, and therefore being forced to reckon with them on our own. In a largely post-Christian, increasingly secularized culture, this makes The Witch a feat of storytelling, for it gets underneath all of the rationalization of the modern human condition and invites us to reckon with the potential reality of a spiritual realm, in this case a horridly dark one. The result is a folktale reminiscent of its portrayed time period that remains resonant today, with its plurality of interpretations inviting further reflection upon the ways in which the spiritual and the material might truly overlap in our own lives and stories.