Robert Eggar's The Witch

by Lucy Johns, mentor

How is a reviewer steeped in the teachings of the Enlightenment to talk about the new film “The Witch”? Its billing as a horror film, a genre unknown to this reviewer, presents further challenge. Yet it comes in the guise of historical drama, the story of a family beset by torments in mid-17th century Massachusetts. An epilogue explains that nearly all the dialogue comes from transcripts of actual witch trials, a common practice in that time and place. But this film is not a recreation of that time and place and the injustice that could and did tear families and communities apart, as for example, in Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible.” While grounded in the the fanaticism of the time, it veers into magical realism, or more accurately, magical insanity.

“The Witch” begins with a disembodied voice questioning why the settlers left all they knew and came where they did while the camera hovers over a child’s face, listening intently. Eventually another voice scolds that such questions are out of order, whoever is speaking is supposed to answer, not ask, questions. The film ends with a disembodied voice, equally insistent. The same voice? The speaker, standing before a tribunal with his family, is sentenced to exile for pride and lack of humility. The family departs as some Indian prisoners are escorted into the village by soldiers. A fate the family is presumably escaping.

On a farm hacked out of the wilderness, things start to go wrong. A baby disappears in the time it takes his sister to cover her eyes and say “Peekaboo.” A pair of twins, five- six years old, starts acting crazy. The oldest child, a girl, confesses grievous sins to her god and scares a sibling by pretending to be a witch. A hideous image of a baby being caressed by a gnarly hand that brings a knife down between his little legs is the first hint that something is more than just wrong, something supernatural is at work. The second oldest, a boy and his father’s principle helpmate, gets lost in the forest behind the farm and encounters a demon woman. He is returned to the farm, deathly ill, throwing up an apple with a bite out of it. Blood comes out of a white goat being milked. A black goat is a killer and speaks with a human voice. Women freed of religious restraint murder, dance naked, and ascend into the sky.

This potent Christian/pagan symbolism occurs within the frame of a family sunk in a “modern” version of deep-set superstition, fundamentalist religion. The father’s response to every mishap is prayer and catechism. Played with remarkable intensity and psychological insight by Ralph Ineson, this is a man completely in thrall to a god he assumes listens to his every word. Yet he is not a harsh person. He is tender to his wife, wild with grief and fear of god’s vengeance. He confides in his son and loves his daughter. But he also sins and lies in the interest of family harmony. His only release from the tension of betrayal and mysterious events is cutting wood, which he does several times during the film, each episode filmed from a different angle, each infused with greater and greater fury.

The cinematography of “The Witch” is extraordinary. Muted colors, dramatic compositions, production design, special effects, the most revealing camera angle and distance for capturing dread, horror, pain, fear of god and so much else unknown testify to the talent of the cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke and the first-time director, Robert Eggers. Eggers also wrote the script and is credited as a production and costume designer for fairy-tale movies. The two have created a bewitching visual work you can’t stop watching while your mind rejects the absurdity of much that transpires.

What lifts The Witch out of the cheap thrills horror genre is not only the artistry but its seriousness of purpose. It explores a provocative intellectual question: what is the nature of magical thinking? The family is steeped in Calvinist precepts: any human is sinful nearly beyond redemption; any misfortune reflects inadequate belief in god; the devil lurks everywhere, staring from the eyes of animals - goats in particular - and sometimes taking over people. The film suggests that religion suffuses the mind with fantasy, a habit of thought that would readily assume a devil to be the origin and explanation of any mystery. The audience, applying a 20th century lens, sees sexual repression, woman as the source of evil (that apple! A forest bacchanalia!), absence of the most elementary psychological insight within the family dynamic. And yet, the film seems to ask: Are the supernatural images projections of deranged minds or…do they capture realities beyond human ken?

What is the difference, anyway, between modern theories of cause and effect, between scientific explanations of the seemingly inexplicable and the primitive assumptions (historically and globally pervasive, one must note) so expertly dramatized in The Witch? This film’s artful symbolism and implicit challenge to the modern sensibility linger.

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Epilogue: This reviewer is reminded of “The Return of Martin Guerre” (France; 1982). A French film about a medieval village and war widow bewitched by a transient soldier, it introduces, at the very end, an exemplar of the modern mind, sent by the authorities to investigate. The official seeks truth, groping for what that is and how to establish it. “The Witch” doesn’t offer any link to modernity, preferring to follow the logic of magical insanity to a visually enticing conclusion.

© Lucy Johns March 7, 2016