--Mercy, The Witch
"What is amiss on this farm? . . . It's not natural."
--Katherine, The Witch
What a spectacular period piece! Robert Egger's historically authentic and wonderfully-executed slow burn horror film is one of the most splendid horror movies in years. Yes, I will repeat again that this is a slow-burn. While The Witch (sometimes spelled The VVitch) certainly might frighten some viewers, it relies on mounting psychological suspense as opposed to depictions of gore for shock value. A dark story, it truly lives up to its subtitle A New England Folktale.
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Production Values
Every cast member--I mean every cast member--portraying one of the members of the family The Witch depicts offers a performance nothing short of lifelike and phenomenal. Even the child actors playing a pair of young twins don't ever seem overshadowed by the adolescent and young adult actors and actresses, one of whom (Ralph Ineson) has appeared in Game of Thrones. Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays the character Thomasin (and also rocked in this year's Split), excellently acts a young girl fighting a false accusation amidst very difficult family times. This was her breakout role, and I hope she has a great future in cinema!
The dialogue, language, and props all seem taken straight from 1600s New England. In fact, at the beginning of the credits text appears saying that the movie "was inspired by many folktales, fairytales and written accounts of historical witchcraft, including journals, diaries and court records," adding that "Much of the dialogue comes directly from these sources". It's not just the manner of speaking and wording used by the characters that is so historically impactful; the very atmosphere was crafted around careful historical investigation.
The eerie soundtrack also amplified the intended creepiness, haunting one of the first scenes and adding a great atmospheric tone. Also, the movie avoids standard horror cliches like gratuitous jump scares, favoring a much more focused and sometimes subtle kind of horror. All in all, this movie has stellar production values all the way up to some sub-standard CGI effects in the very last scene. Other than that, it is difficult to find something to criticize about the care and precision imbued into the film!
Story
A family of New England settlers--William the father, Katherine the mother, Thomasin the oldest daughter, Caleb the next oldest son, and Mercy and Jonas the young twins--are expelled from a small civilization due to some theological dispute William has with the local governance. William is a committed Christian who says to his condemners that "I cannot be judged by false Christians, for I have done nothing save preach Christ's true Gospel". Despite his insistence on his innocence, his family is banished and travels some distance away where they build a house and farm.
(SPOILERS are below)
The family's newborn baby Samuel is kidnapped in an act that occurs with superhuman swiftness, a hooded figure carrying the baby away into the forest. The baby is implicitly killed and crushed into a bloody pulp for use in a witch's ritual. Things begin to spiral downward after this, with the family experiencing crop failure, Mercy and Jonas singing songs about the family goat Black Phillip, and William and Caleb being unable to hunt a rabbit that may have a supernatural nature.
Out by a calm stream, Mercy plays around and says "I be the witch of the Wood", claims to Thomasin and Caleb that a witch stole Samuel, that the witch ventures about in the forest sometimes, and that Black Phillip speaks to her; Thomasin jokes with her and claims to be the witch who abducted the baby, scaring her off. But family life is no joking matter when Katherine laments how the family will starve and that Thomasin must be sent to live with another family. Caleb leaves on a night adventure, caught and joined by Thomasin before he can depart, saying he will return the next day. What ultimately results is not their return as planned but Caleb's encounter with a strange woman in the forest, with Thomasin wandering home before him and eventually finding him stumbling back to the house later on, ill and unclothed.
Once Caleb chokes up an entire Apple from his mouth and speaking to himself, Katherine judges this to be the result of witchcraft, Mercy accusing Thomasin of identifying as a witch, saying she stole Samuel (and Katherine agrees with her charge). But Thomasin calls Black Phillip, whom the twins converse with, Lucifer, and says that Mercy once identified as a witch, though it seemed like a jest at the time. Caleb dies from his condition.
William, unsure of what else to do, plans to move the family away the next day and places Thomasin, Mercy and Jonas in a little barn structure to confine them, nailing boards up to keep them inside. Mercy and Jonas do not answer when asked if they speak with Black Phillip. That night, a witch supernaturally enters the structure and attacks Mercy and Jonas. The next morning William finds the boards he nailed up torn open and almost everything inside the barn dead except for Thomasin. Black Phillip gores and kills William, Katherine accuses Thomasin yet again of witchcraft and Thomasin has to kill her in self-defense.
She sleeps afterward from exhaustion and awakes that night to head to the barn, where she asks Black Phillip to speak to her, and, hearing nothing, turns around. The goat transforms (offscreen) into a demonic figure with the shape of a man and speaks, implying that she can "live deliciously" and "see the world" if she signs a book. She is commanded to remove her clothes, denuded herself, signs the book, and walks into the forest, where she finds a group of similarly nude witches dancing and chanting around a fire, the goat form of Black Phillip following her. In the final shot Thomasin's facial expressions indicate a pleasurable surrender to some intoxicating foreign energy.
Intellectual Content
William, in a move not uncommon to religious people I have known of in general, when asked if he will continue to violate the New England colony's church and social laws, says "If my conscience sees it fit". As I have addressed many times before, both conscience and social laws have no trustworthiness whatsoever and and inherently unreliable in themselves. Religious people, who often rightly understand morality to be grounded in God's nature, can still fall back on the fallacies involved with viewing their own consciences as somehow informing them of accurate moral information from their respective gods. The movie scarcely provided any details about the exact nature of his dispute with the local clergy or politicians, and I wish it had developed the theme of the subjectivity of conscience better.
And now I'm going to address the infamous Exodus 22:18 verse, which says "Do not allow a sorceress to live". Exodus 22:18 can come under fire from some websites, and while the mere practice of magic (if magic is defined a certain way) does not mean that a witch practices murder or abduction (which the Bible also classifies as capital crimes too; see Exodus 21:12-14 and Exodus 21:16 respectively), this movie, as I actually referenced in an earlier post on the possible malevolence of witches [1], portrays just what some in history have feared witches for. When the Bible says to execute sorceresses (and sorcerers in Leviticus 20:27), there is no evidence that it means to prescribe execution for anything less than actual sorcery, not for pretending to harness sorcerous powers or just for feigning some psychic ability.
Still, although I totally understand both why modern "witches" (Wiccans [2]) are not necessarily included in the capital prescription of Exodus 22:18 and why a genuine witch might be feared, I want to draw attention to some humorous stuff in history about witches. According to what I have seen written about a 1487 witch-hunting manual titled Malleus Maleficarum (meaning "Hammer of Witches"), witches were accused of stealing penises, keeping them (somehow independently alive, as if they have their own consciousness) confined in nests, and feeding them oats . . . as if they were personal pets! The Bible never describes such things as being affiliated with sorcery!
While The Witch shows that witches could be highly malevolent and dangerous individuals, it also portrays a warning about hysteria without rational grounding--when Katherine accuses Thomasin of being a witch, she only resorts to fallacies (post hoc ergo propter hoc, non sequitur, begging the question) to condemn her, whereas William initially insists "I'll have proof, or heaven help thee." At least he refuses to condemn without far more evidence, yet after Caleb's death he begins to suspect her. Still, I appreciated how the film did not avoid showing both the dangerous nature of witches and how one cannot simply jump aboard a witch hunting train without sufficient evidence.
Conclusion
In The Witch I see hope for the production of a new generation of horror movies that focus on atmosphere, acting, and story, forgoing cliches and jump scares and other such things that can drag down the genre. Robert Egger delivered an excellent final product, and I hope he can continue to direct as his skills lead him. I remember watching The Witch in theaters multiple times upon its theatrical release in early 2016 and being impressed by the potency of its acting, especially regarding Anya Taylor-Joy, who has since starred in Split and is set to star in next year's upcoming X-Men film New Mutants. It is my wish that just as the The Witch initiated the acting career of Taylor-Joy, The Witch signals a time of refocus for horror.
Content:
1. Violence: A witch kills and implicitly grinds up a baby (the acts occur unseen) and then smears its blood on her body (onscreen). A dream of one character involves a bird pecking her breast and producing blood. A goat gores a man's stomach. Thomasin kills her mother in self-defense, releasing blood.
2. Nudity: The witch who kidnaps the baby, an old woman, is shown naked from the rear and rubs blood on her nude body near the very beginning of the movie; while rubbing the blood a breast is visible (but female breasts are not sex organs or body parts which have any objectively sexual nature). In the final scene a coven of witches dances nude around a fire, with Thomasin approaching and joining them, herself nude and seen from the rear.
[1]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/09/a-defense-of-exodus-2218.html
[2]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/08/an-introduction-to-wicca.html
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