A Review on The Witch (2015)

Warning: Contains spoilers

The Witch is an American horror movie made by the budding director, Robert Eggers. Being the brainchild of Eggers, one can expect the film to be disturbing and on that note it does not fail to deliver. It is visually and thematically disturbing. The film features a fair amount of gore and violence and so this is not the film for the weak of constitution. The film draws on the historical period of the seventeenth century, weaving a hyper-realistic setting which breeds supernatural horror.

The movie is lush with realistic details. It uses early modern English to illustrate the lives of the colonists in New England. The Witch mixes the feeling of the unknown and strangeness induced by the seemingly remote land of America in the eyes of the banished Puritan family, with the horror of the satanic cults and iniquitous malevolent witches. It also records terror in the quotidian.The incident of seeing a rabbit peculiarly staring as if human, and the blood in the eggs the family feed on, and the loss of a dog in the forest express such dramatic terrors that is surprising to the audience used to huge monsters with sharp teeth revisiting the camera in each and every minute in ordinary horror flicks.

The movie revolves around a Puritan family, banished from the Puritan plantation for difference in interpretation of The New Testament. Katherine, the mother, is a pious believer in Christianity and paranoid in almost everything, interpreting each and every unfortunate event as a sign for desertion by God. Her husband, however, is a man of practicality and dubious in the fearful statements of his wife. The family have five children, two naughty twins who hover the roof down wherever they are, a nearly thirteen-year-old boy called Caleb and the oldest child of the family, Thomasin, a seventeen-year-old girl whose responsibility to her family is overwhelming.

The family fall into a vicious circle of unfortunate events, with Caleb being trapped and killed by a witch, Katherine taking the flights of madness after his child’s death and William doubting his oldest daughter for witchery. The terror and queasiness synchronise the horrific disappearance of Samuel, Katherine’s new-born child and the force of the evil penetrating the family and devastating their lives. Eggers says, “I wanted to have the feeling of everyone feeling sick to their stomachs and having this weight of guilt and shittiness and fear all the time,”.

He uses each unsettling event in order to build tension, suspense and a terrific atmosphere around the family. Despite its slow pace at the beginning, the film leaves the audience stuck in their seats, anticipating and speculating the horrible eminent future for the family and their miserable fates. The movie taps into the fear of the profane, the evil and satanic force penetrating the most religious and innocent people in a family. There are hints of desires to incest, expressions of irreverence and sacrilege which start to grow inside the seemingly immaculate children. The slow-building horror makes each small event a harbinger of a greater catastrophe and hence lets seeds of sickness and guilt gradually grow in the audience.

The banishment of the family for heresy is an important element that colors the way the viewers might interpret the proceedings in the film. Are they punished by God for their heresy or is it just an accident that the sinister witch residing in the dark woods steals their child and satan takes hold of the family? Why does satan choose Thomasin for witchery instead of the twins and their mother? My take on the matter is that these are the same questions the characters struggle with. Katherine prays to God for her family and is not aided by him. She sees hallucinations of her son, Caleb and Samuel getting breastfed from her breast while in reality, a crow is pecking at her bloodied breast. The family are cursed and what makes it even more terrifying is that they do not know or can not believe the reason for it. It does not occur to them that they have done something profane since the father is certain and faithful in his heresy and when it does, there is no protection by God. The unexpectedness of their doomed fates seem to convey even more horror than the fate, itself.

It surely has occurred to many people that they are having a bad luck, as if they are cursed. Their girlfriend leaves them, they lose their jobs, somebody robs them and they become penniless and without the slightest hope to begin a new life. One might wonder why indeed all these unfortunate events should occur to me, but no matter how much they think of the reason for their bad omen, they can not be sure. This uncertainty, the indecisiveness and the unsolved problem at the back of one’s mind are horrific. This question as to who or what is working against us is close to the reality of our everyday life and it does surprisingly well in a horror movie. The film can also be read as a scathing social commentary about the patriarchal society. After the death of her father, Thomasin hears Black Philipe, the black goat of the family talk to her, inviting her to join other witches. Thomasin is resentful of the destiny her parents have designed for her, which is sending her as a servant to a rich household for her budding womanhood and so she accepts satan’s offer. Satan disguised in the shape of a goat might embody the new father or male protector, who kills the previous patriarch and bestows the young lady with new abilities and opportunities. While not many people in their right frame of mind will consider selling one’s soul to satan, at the end of the movie, and given all the ups and downs of Thomasin’s life, we can understand why she sheds no tears for her life as her father’s daughter and is ready to take another identity. This is quite chilling since were we in her shoes, we might have made the same decision. Although the film chronicles a dark voyage of self-discovery for the main character, I can see an undercurrent of religion-related fear that plays throughout the film.