Fear and Loathing in Colonial New England
The Witch / directed by Robert Eggers
The Witch starts with a scene of exile, as William (Ralph Enison), his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie), and their children are thrown out of their 17th century New England settlement on account of the father’s heterodox religious beliefs. Cut off from their already isolated human community (so far from England!), William sees an opportunity to live according to his own religious beliefs, and closer to the will of God. But as they make a new life in a rough-hewn homestead hard by dark and encroaching woods, it’s not long before the family’s faith begins to be tested: their newborn disappears literally from out under the nose of their eldest daughter, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), in what seems an impossible disappearance; but the audience at least sees the agent behind it -- a cloaked figure who carries the baby through those dark woods to a secret location, where the child is killed and its pulpified body slathered onto the skin of his murderer. The sequence is rendered mysterious and unearthly by incomplete glimpses of what exactly goes on (though a mortar and pestle-type processing of the baby’s body seems to be part of the procedure); but despite the grisly and weird presentation, it’s unexpectedly matter of fact rather than malign or sadistic, as if someone were going about necessary business that lies outside human notions of good and evil.
The family assumes an animal must have taken the baby; in retrospect the shock of the loss starts a process of familial dissolution and spiritual crisis that ripples through the rest of the tale. It doesn’t help that their crops fail, and that other attempts to feed themselves are confounded by bad luck or worse: William’s gun backfires when he tries to kill a rabbit, their billy goat runs wild, chicken eggs are inedible. Whether or not they fully blame her for the loss of her brother, both parents seem to identify Thomasin and her budding sexuality as part of the family’s problem, and they decide she should be sent away to work for a family back in the settlement. But things go from bad to worse when her younger brother Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) hatches a plan to prevent this, only to get lost in the woods and have his own unfortunate encounter with a witch.
The family’s descent into blame, paranoia, and worse feels persuasive, particularly as we know, even if they don’t, that the demonic forces they fear really do exist in the woods. But part of the film’s effectiveness is that we can see how they could fall into this sort of mutual recrimination even if there were no actual witches: in their isolation, their religious fervor, the unarticulated sexual turbulence associated with Thomasin, and the way that death seems to stalk them, they’re primed to give way to a collective madness. Children pick up cues from parents; parents react to what they sense in their children, and round and round the spiral goes. The family’s existence outside of a broader human community, and Williams’ professed wish to live more in tune with divine dictates, is clearly depicted as a recipe for disaster. Without the framework of human society and non-religious law, and caught up in a struggle between good and evil supercharged by unconscious or barely conscious family resentments, justice and mercy fall by the wayside.
The film’s ride in the way way back machine, straight through to the origins of European settlement of this country, lends it a particular thrill and heft - it’s inevitably a commentary on where we came from, an origin story of sorts. By this point, I’m guessing that our culture has passed a tipping point in its views of the Salem witch trials (which the action of the movie precedes by a few decades, but is an inevitable reference point for any viewer), their anti-female crusade central to their reason and meaning. So what to make of the fact that this movie’s universe fully embraces the idea that there actually were Satan-worshipping witches in those dark woods? At one level, as I’ve alluded to already, this creates a curious tension in The Witch: it’s a sophisticated take on the power of religious thought, family isolation, and paranoia, but at the same time, there are physical witches that one could say end up being the true architects of the family’s doom - it’s not like it was all in their own minds.
So what to make of the witch? She seem to be identified as European, rather than as a Native American presence, and her life in the woods suggests she’s also an outcast from the settler society. Being cast out and exiled is an overarching theme of the film, whether from the community of other humans or from god’s grace: it’s what puts the family in the demonic pickle they find themselves in, and it’s the family’s chosen solution for handling their fears about Thomasin. In the film, the witch strikes me as the ultimate outcast presence made manifest: everyone’s fear of the evil that may lurk within themselves, and perhaps everyone’s secret desire as well - to be free from any rules or repressions. In the film’s economical storytelling, the witch’s power comes in part from her ability to appeal to our desires as well as our fears; at its most powerful, her force is seductive rather than simply destructive (although there’s plenty of the latter in the final act).
In some ways, though, the ideas and interests of The Witch are more powerful than their actualization on screen. For sure, it’s a tight production that makes effective use of its primal setting, and the play of light and shadow, the contrasts of colorful and muted palettes, are both aesthetically and thematically effective. There are some good dramatic moments, too; that troublesome goat is particularly unsettling (I feel I am veering close to praising the goat’s acting), and a scene in which multiple family members appear to be possessed is a real nail biter (and also highlights what a fantastic cast this film has, including very solid acting by all the children). But the appearances of the witch (or - spoiler alert - multiple witches) are to varying degrees failed attempts to spook and unsettle. The filmmakers strain for the uncanny, but don’t quite make it over the hump of weird and unusual - adequate, but not chill-inducing, let alone groundbreaking. And there are a couple climactic scenes of violence that seem not to do justice at all to the film’s sophisticated blend of menace and decay - it feels like stock solutions were deployed when this carefully wrought film deserved better. The final scenes aim to be an eerie tour de force of suggestion and imagery, but the impact just isn’t there, and is undercut by special effects that probably should have been left aside in favor of another approach.