They left their fathers’ houses in England and crossed the vastness of the sea to found a New England they hoped would be the Kingdom of God on Earth. In the opening scene of The Witch: A New-England Folktale, those early Puritans are putting one of their own on trail. William (Ralph Ineson) is a heretic who if anything has a stricter interpretation of the Puritans’ grim iteration of Christianity. They banish him along with his kin from their walled settlement at the edge of the world and William departs with his family on a rickety cart, watching the wooden gate shut behind them. William desires that his new homestead will become a shining beacon in the wilderness. Soon enough it darkens into a province of hell.
The Witch is the most remarkable horror film in years. First-time writer-director Robert Eggers composed a visually poetic, haunting portrayal of the crushing burden of an unbearable faith—and its satanic flipside. Seldom has the intimacy of prayer been presented so well in film, or the disconcerting intrusion of pure evil into the human sphere. There is blood but none of the torture porn, or that algorithm of jolting moments, that characterize third-rate horror. The Witch’s horror works on the psyche and creeps in and out of the narrative like a thief with a skeleton key.
The creed William instills into his family, which insists on the complete depravity of humankind, reaps its own sour harvest as his newborn son disappears and his adolescent daughter, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), becomes a woman. The lure of dancing naked in the moonlight might prove too great a temptation for a girl whose life is hemmed in by guilt and defined by a God imagined as a vengeful judge.
The Witch evokes the New World imagined by the Pilgrim pioneers as a stubborn wilderness to be subjugated, an unending forest inhabited by doubtful natives and filled with darkness. The cinematography conjures the awesome sublimity of 19th-century American landscape art as well as the candlelit interiors of 16th-century domestic paintings. As much as anything else, The Witch’s original “folktale” puts the spirit of Nathaniel Hawthorne on screen as well, if not better, than any film actually based on his stories.
The Witch
4 stars
Anya Taylor-Joy
Ralph Ineson
Directed by Robert Eggers
Rated R
