Written and directed by Robert Eggers
Society’s always been ill at ease with women who don’t conform to patriarchal standards of domestic submission and diligent servitude, and the vocabulary to describe them has always been a living document. Today we describe self-possessed women on a sliding scale of increasing misogyny, but we used to just call them witches: women who ate babies, led men to their doom, and lived alone in the woods.
The undertone of the accusation was that they cared not for men, being second to them, confining themselves to the domestic sphere, and generally being resigned to mute obedience. It’s not hard to imagine more than a few women were burned at the stake simply because they wouldn’t suffer ignorant men.
Robert Eggers’ The Witch, the story of a settler family’s misery in the New England countryside in the 17th century is a keen horror, a sneaky comedy, and a deft dissection of just how witches are made.
Anya Taylor-Joy plays Thomasin, the eldest child and daughter of William (Ralph Ineson) and Katherine (Kate Dickie), Puritan settlers who have been ousted from the village because William was preaching the wrong gospel. They’re thrown into the wild, and as they move into an isolated one-room hut with an attic attached, the family, which beyond Thomasin, William, and Katherine, also includes oldest son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), two precocious twin siblings, and a newborn, they soon fall prey to the supernatural.
How to explain it? Initial attempts tend towards the natural, but soon the twins begin speaking of a witch of the woods, and the family’s foothold on rationality is brief. Soon fear takes hold, and stoked by grief and frustration with their sorry lot (William is an awful settler, incapable of hunting or farming) the literal witch-hunt begins. In the middle stands Thomasin, tasked with holding the family together but little of the authority, which still resides with her parents.
Her womanhood draws the eye of her teen brother, the twins resent her authority over them, and the fact the baby goes missing on her watch puts her in poor standing with her parents. Who’d want all this crossfire?
Her precarious situation becomes clear as she tries to figure out the tragedies befalling the unhappy family, and Eggers doesn’t leave dread to chance. The Witch is a chilling breath on your neck throughout, and while it does have some jumpy scares when you’re confronted with grizzly sights all too close for comfort, its power lies in how it strips away the protective power of the hearth. Evil has unfettered access to this family, and the dissolution of its structure and roles is the consequence. No one feels that more than Thomasin.
The ominous fog hangs so thickly over The Witch you almost fail to appreciate some of the witticism and physical comedy Eggers’ movie also holds. This is a fun movie! I’ve always felt the exhilaration of fear thins the veil that keeps us from laughter, and The Witch is a great example of that, ripe with the outlandish and the absurd. The distance between wide-eyed horror, gross-out wince, and goofy grin is short.
There’s more than meets the eye with The Witch, this tale of a family’s woe and a woman’s self-discovery within it. It’s mercurial, it’s angst-ridden, and a novel insight into folk myth whose significance still resonates.
Mikkel Frederiksen 