Movie review: 'The Witch' casts spell as untraditional horror/thriller
February 19, 2016 12:00 AM
All of them are bothered and bewildered. But which is the witch, and which the bewitched?
Writer-director Robert Eggers' demonic debut film is introduced as "a New England folktale." In fact, it rolls multiple Brothers Grimm fables and even grimmer legends of witchcraft into a dark amalgamation — something like "Hansel and Gretel Meet the Exorcist" — that falls somewhere between horror and thriller genres.
We're in 1630, when deeply devout Puritans William and Katherine run afoul of the Massachusetts Bay Colony religious authorities and are banishéd — accent on the final syllable — from the group's protected plantation. They pack up their five children and meager belongings to go it alone, homesteading on the edge of a thick, foreboding forest.
Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson.
Rating: R for disturbing violent content and graphic nudity.
Life there is hard. Understatement. Things go pretty well for a while, thanks to their work ethic and the good relationship between older siblings Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw). Never mind the bratty younger twins Mercy and Jonas. But one day the family's newborn baby mysteriously vanishes, and all frantic efforts to find him fail. So do the crops. Even the animals take to acting strangely.
Animal mayhem warning: Satan may get your — and his own — goat. There are more bad omens, bad dreams and bad luck than you can shake a broomstick at here. Are the forces of evil real or imagined? Maybe both. Who in this family has made God so angry? In mounting fear and confusion, they begin to suspect and turn on one another.
A hit at last year's Sundance Festival, "The Witch" is rich in historical detail, its sets, costumes and mise-en-scène as meticulously crafted as its mood. New England's malevolent wilderness (re-created in northern Ontario) harkens everyone's childhood warning: Don't go into the woods alone! Indoor scenes are lit solely by candle and fireplace, often resembling Rembrandt canvases.
Most fascinating — if problematic — is the film's use of Jacobean period language, culled from contemporary Puritan prayer books and diaries, delivered in the characters' thick North Yorkshire accents. Its "thee, thou and thy" cadences are beautifully authentic but make for tough intelligibility.
Meanwhile, all obligatory tropes of the genre are present and accounted for, including the ominous music. But so are Mr. Eggers' higher cinematic aims, in the form of his inspiration from Ingmar Bergman — "Cries and Whispers" in particular — and his nods to "Carrie" and "The Shining," which contribute to the truly unnerving sense of psychological dread he creates here.
How could it not, given the raw material? The witch as a dark feminine force of evil has been with us through the ages, especially in the wild revels of Walpurgisnacht, aka Witches' Sabbath, on May Day eve. A key scene in Goethe's "Faust" is called "Walpurgisnacht." So is Act II of Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Hawthorne's great 1835 story "Young Goodman Brown" also is concerned with it: The title character leaves his wife for a weird midnight ceremony. It's set during the Salem witch trials, at which Hawthorne's great-great-grandfather John Hathorne was a judge. Hereditary guilt moved the author to change his surname by adding a "w."
Witches were blamed for the famines, plagues and wars of the times. The devil and his diabolical deputies were an accepted explanation for otherwise inexplicable disasters. Sabbath stories' prurient, orgiastic elements provided effective advertising for hunting down and prosecuting witches, culminating in the 1692 trials: 26 women hanged, starting with the girls of Rev. Samuel Parris' household (no relation).
All that was half a century after the setting of this film — 10 years after Plymouth Rock. Christian theocracy's bogeymen held a choke hold on the Puritan psyche.
"The Witch" features fine, creepy performances by Ralph Ineson, looking much like Jesus, Kate Dickie as his long-suffering wife, gorgeous blond Ms. Taylor-Joy as their daughter, and — best of all — freckled Mr. Scrimshaw as her brother Caleb. There's a fine line between religious and demonic ecstasy, and young Harvey crosses it in his climactic possession scene. It's an incredible piece of acting. I hope they paid him enough for the lifetime of therapy he'll need as a result of it.
There's an even finer line between realistic subtlety and supernatural shock. "The Witch" wants it both ways, and its big jump-scare moments pump up almost as much blood as Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight."
Yet it's too muted for mainstream tastes. For glossier stuff, see Jennifer Kent's "The Babadook" (2014), in which the mother of an angelic/demonic 7-year-old needs to keep an exorcist on speed-dial. In both cases, the calibrated anxiety is good, but the grand-finale payoff is not quite satisfying.
There are no conventional nightmares on this "Witch's" Elm Street. But it's an original, intriguing change from the hellish Hollywood formula.
Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris: parispg48@aol.com.
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