Cast. Kate Dickie, Ralph Ineson, Harvey Scrimshaw, Anya Taylor-Joy.
Rating. 73%
Writer and director, Robert Eggers' feature-length directorial debut received widespread acclaim at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. And rightly so, The Witch is a highly accomplished piece of low-budget filmmaking and suggests Robert Eggers is a unique storyteller of considerable talent.
The Witch is an unnerving historical drama about a Puritan family's emotional breakdown and descent into madness on a small farm at the edge of a menacing wood in 17th-century, New England. The concept is something akin to a cross between The Crucible and The Shining, and the latter Robert Eggers cited as a source of inspiration for The Witch.
Director of Photography Jarin Blaschke's cinematography and image composition - in particular the muted, misty New England countryside and impenetrable forest lifted straight from the pages of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale - is spectacular and a precursor for similarly stunning work on The Northman.
Eggers cleverly stretches the meagre budget by casting two relatively unknown British actors (at least outwith the UK) to fiercely portray the parents - William (Ralph Ineson) and Katherine (Kate Dickie). Both are comfortable with the formal, austere approach to dialogue and anchor The Witch with a degree of gravitas.
However, this is Anya Taylor-Joy's film. A mere 18 years old when Robert Eggers cast the young actress as the suggestively named Thomasin, the routinely misunderstood family scapegoat, who may or may not be the witch of the title. In her first major role, this is an assured performance with Taylor-Joy capable of portraying an aura of innocence and subversive depravity in equal measure.
The Witch is no traditional horror movie. The film is loaded with symbolism and suggestive satanic breadcrumbs - the failed harvest, the blood in the milk and the family goat, the ominously named Black Philip. Eggers seems fascinated by the folklore and superstition of the period, and the terror that flourished in a period of widespread starvation, illness and infant mortality. The Witch is unsettling, unnatural and, at times, inexplicable. This is no rational interpretation, instead Eggers challenges the audience's perception. And in the end, the audience will see in it what they want to see, or what they want to believe.
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