The first and only two words that come to mind as I sit and gather my thoughts on Robert Eggers' Sundance darling The Witch rhyme with "moley" and "truck."
The hype is real with this one, folks. To the horror fans bemoaning the glut of mainstream, jump-scare-ridden fare, especially from the United States, your search for a new classic is over.
The Witch is billed as "a New England folktale" that borrows its story and language from myriad accounts of demonic possession, native folklore, and personal diaries from around the time that the first settlers came to America in the early 17th century. I'm concerned that the production design and old English language used in the film are so period-accurate that it may throw too many mainstream audiences for a loop. This is not your typical horror film, and that may disappoint less discerning viewers. The Witch is a slow-burning tragedy about a Puritan family that tears itself apart on a spiritual level. There are no jump scares and very little gore to be had. However, Eggers' story, lighting design, and Mark Korvan's evocative score combine to create a pea soup-like sense of dread from start to finish.
Things get off to an unnerving start when the main family is banished from their settlement and move to a secluded farm at the edge of a forest. Mysterious events cause everyone in the family to undergo individual crises of faith as their limits are tested by evil in its purest form.
Eggers' cast is full of relatively unknown faces which makes it easier to buy into their fear. These are meant to be real, average people, and the audience accepts them as such on the strength of the central performances. Newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy plays the oldest daughter, Thomasin, whose perspective the story adheres to most. Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie play the parents. Ineson's patriarch, William, is a man who would have everyone believe that he is a stalwart in faith. But what's most interesting about his performance is the way Ineson nails the fine line between his Godly duty to faith and family and succumbing to the evil before him. Dickie plays the emotionally-unstable mother Katherine struggling to keep her children (and her sanity) in check.
Like most slow-burning horror films, stuff seriously hits the fan in the last 15 minutes. The Witch is no different. See the movie for yourself, but when it comes out that the distributor, A24, showed the film to a group of real-life satanists and got a ringing endorsement from the actual Satanic Temple, that should generally be taken as a good sign for a horror film.
A
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