It’s anything but a traditional horror movie, because of it’s pace, dialogue and very simple plot. If you follow news and reviews for horror movies, then The Witch is one of those movies you really haven’t been able to miss. It casts a spell that lingers long after its most disquieting mists have cleared.This movie may not be for everyone, but if you surrender to the intensity of The Witch, you will be rewarded with an amazing – and very scary – story. For fans of horror at its most sinister, “The Witch” is not to be missed. Along with Harvey Scrimshaw, who plays Thomasin’s attentive brother Caleb, Taylor-Joy elevates “The Witch” from the impressive to the revelatory, delivering a performance that is delicate, steely, vulnerable and potent all at once. It isn’t until the film’s graphic, gory denouement that Eggers’s command begins to slip and “The Witch” enters conventional body-horror territory, its increasingly graphic imagery and keening pitch supplanting the more effective restraint and misdirection that have gone before.Īmong his many strengths, Eggers possesses an acute eye for casting: The physically imposing Ineson, blessed with a sonorous, basso profundo of a speaking voice, handles William’s filigreed speech patterns beautifully, and Dickie is equally adept at evoking the self-sacrifice and determination of a woman who’s both a helpmeet and pioneer in her own right.īut if “The Witch” belongs to anyone it’s Taylor-Joy, a dead ringer for Michelle Williams who makes a stunning debut as a young woman caught between the depredations of both the natural and supernatural worlds. (A24 Films)Įggers reportedly based his script on actual diaries and accounts from a time that predated the Salem witch trials by several decades, giving “The Witch” the mannered cadences and rhythms of something written on parchment rather than celluloid (or, in this case, the data-capture chip of an Arri Alexa digital camera). (Viewers could profitably debate the far more novel and sophisticated critique of Manifest Destiny in “The Witch,” as compared with the overwrought theatrics of “The Revenant.”)Ī family in 1630s New England is torn apart by the forces of witchcraft, black magic and possession. Aided by Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography - which recalls Vermeer’s most haunting portraits in its candlelit glow and velvety shadows - and a slashing, dissonant score by Mark Korven, Eggers plunges viewers into a world of icy severity and harsh deprivation, putting the lie to the cozy American myth of resourceful, poor-but-happy settlers. Until now, Eggers has worked as a production designer and art director for independent films and TV shows, his visual depth and fluency giving “The Witch” a look that is both austere and improbably rich. A series of bizarre events begins to unfold, each more terrifying than the last, calling into question whether the farm’s blighted crops, strangely behaving animals and apparent descent into madness are a function of William’s and Katherine’s religious paranoia or the handiwork of Satan. When their oldest daughter, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), takes her infant brother for a walk one day, she ventures too close to the woods, which are strangely charged with palpable but invisible forces. “The Witch” begins in 1630, as an English settler named William (Ralph Ineson) is being banished from his New England plantation of Puritan colonists, forcing him to move with his wife, Katherine (Kate Dickie), and their four children to a hardscrabble farm on the outskirts of a forbidding forest. An avatar of a sub-genre that might be called Colonial gothic, this chillingly atmospheric story of Calvinist zealotry and creeping hysteria joins the ranks of such landmark horror films as “The Omen,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Exorcist.” The fact that “The Witch” comports itself less like an imitator of those classics than their progenitor is a tribute to a filmmaker who, despite his newcomer status, seems to have arrived in the full throes of maturity, in full control of his prodigious powers. (A24)Ī grim, uneasy sense of doom pervades “The Witch,” writer-director Robert Eggers’s audacious and assured feature debut. In “The Witch,” Anya Taylor-Joy plays Thomasin, the oldest daughter of a family subject to bizarre and terrifying events on their farm on the edge of a forest in Colonial America.
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