Psycho's Movie Reviews #144: The VVitch (2015)

The Witch (stylized as The VVitch, and subtitled A New-England Folktale) is a 2015 period supernatural horror film written and directed by Robert Eggers in his feature directorial debut. The film stars Anya Taylor-Joy (in her first film appearance), Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, and Lucas Dawson. Set in the 1630s, The Witch follows a Puritan family who encounter forces of evil in the woods beyond their New England farm.

An international co-production of the United States and Canada, The Witch premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 27, 2015, and was widely released by A24 on February 19, 2016. The film received critical acclaim and was a box office success, grossing $40 million against a budget of $4 million.

Plot

In 1630s New England, English settler William and his family—wife Katherine, daughter Thomasin, son Caleb, and fraternal twins Mercy and Jonas—are banished from a Puritan colony over a religious dispute. The family builds a farm near a large, secluded forest and Katherine bears her fifth child, Samuel. One day, when Thomasin is playing peekaboo with Samuel, the baby abruptly disappears. It is soon revealed that a witch has stolen the unbaptized Samuel, killing him and using his body to make a flying ointment.

Katherine, devastated by Samuel's abduction, spends her days crying and praying. While hunting with William, Caleb questions whether Samuel's unbaptized soul will reach Heaven. William discloses to Caleb that he traded Katherine's prized silver cup for hunting supplies. That night, Katherine questions Thomasin about the disappearance of the cup and suspects her to be responsible for Samuel's disappearance. The children overhear their parents discuss sending Thomasin away to serve another family.

Later, Thomasin finds Caleb preparing to check a trap in the forest, and forces him to take her with him by threatening to awaken their parents. In the woods, they spot a hare, which sends their horse into a panic. Their dog Fowler gives chase to the hare, and Caleb pursues them. The horse throws Thomasin, knocking her unconscious, and runs away. Caleb becomes lost in the woods and stumbles upon Fowler's disembowelled body. He then discovers a hovel, from which a beautiful woman emerges to seduce him. Her arm grows withered and gnarled and reveals advanced age as she kisses and embraces Caleb.

William finds Thomasin and takes her home, and Katherine angrily chastises her for taking Caleb into the woods. William reluctantly admits that he sold the cup. Later that night, as a storm rages, Thomasin discovers Caleb outside the home, nude, delirious, and mysteriously ill. The next day, the twins converse and sing songs with Black Phillip, the family's billy goat, and accuse Thomasin of witchcraft. Thomasin attempts to milk the nanny goat, only to get blood. When Caleb awakens, he vomits up a whole apple with a single bite taken out of it. Katherine urges the family to pray, but the twins claim to forget the proper words and become unresponsive. Caleb passionately proclaims his love for Christ and dies.

William, believing Thomasin to be a witch, tells her she will be put on trial when the family returns to town. Thomasin points out William's own sins and accuses the twins in retaliation. Enraged, William seals the children in the goat house. Thomasin denies being a witch, but the twins do not answer when she asks if they have truly spoken with Black Phillip. Thomasin overhears William breaking down and confessing to God that he has been prideful, and that he made his family leave their village out of stubbornness rather than sincere religious devotion. Later in the night, the children awaken to see an old and haggard woman drinking milk from the nanny goat, which turns to attack the twins. Meanwhile, Katherine has a hallucinatory vision of Caleb holding Samuel. Caleb offers the baby to her and asks if she will look at a book. She chooses to breastfeed the baby, but it is actually a raven that pecks at her breast, leaving her bloody in the morning.

William awakens and finds the stable destroyed, the goats eviscerated, the twins missing, and an unconscious Thomasin lying nearby with bloodstained hands. As Thomasin awakens, Black Phillip gores and kills William before her eyes. An unhinged Katherine, now blaming Thomasin for the tragedies and misfortunes and accusing her of seducing William and Caleb, attacks her. Thomasin kills her mother with a bill hook in self-defence.

Now alone, Thomasin hears chiming and enters the stable, where she urges Black Phillip to speak to her. The goat responds with a human voice, asking if she would like to "live deliciously," and materializes into a tall, black-clad man. He tells Thomasin to remove her clothes and sign her name in a book that appears before her. Thomasin follows Black Phillip into the forest nude, where she joins a coven holding a Witches' Sabbath around a bonfire. The witches begin to levitate, and a madly laughing Thomasin joins them, ascending above the trees.

Production

Development

Eggers, who was born in New Hampshire, was inspired to write the film by his childhood fascination with witches and frequent visits to the Plimoth Plantation as a schoolboy. After unsuccessfully pitching films that were "too weird, too obscure", Eggers realized that he would have to make a more conventional film. He said at a Q&A, "If I'm going to make a genre film, it has to be personal and it has to be good." The production team worked extensively with British and American museums, as well as consulting experts on 17th-century British agriculture. Eggers wanted the set constructed to be as historically accurate as possible, and therefore brought in a thatcher and a carpenter from Virginia and Massachusetts respectively who had the proper experience building in the style of that period.

Eggers wanted to film the picture on location in New England but the lack of tax incentives meant he had to settle for Canada. This proved to be something of a problem for Eggers, because he could not find the forest environment he was looking for in the country. They had to go "off the map", eventually finding a location (Kiosk, Ontario) that was "extremely remote"; Eggers said that the nearest town "made New Hampshire look like a metropolis".

The casting took place in England, as Eggers wanted authentic accents to represent a family newly arrived in Plymouth.

Filming

In order to give the film an authentic look, Eggers shot only "with natural light and indoors, the only lighting was candles". Eggers also chose the spelling of the film's title as "The VVitch" (using two Vs instead of W) in its title sequence and on posters, stating that he found this spelling in a Jacobean-era pamphlet on witchcraft, along with other period texts.

In December 2013, costume designer Linda Muir joined the crew, and consulted 35 books in the Clothes of the Common People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England series to plan the costumes. The costumes were made with wool, linen, or hemp. Muir also lobbied for a larger costume budget. A troupe of Butoh dancers played the coven of witches at the end of the film, creating their own choreography.

Music

Mark Korven wrote the film's score, which aimed to be "tense and dissonant", while focusing on minimalism. Eggers vetoed the use of any electronic instruments and "didn't want any traditional harmony or melody in the score", and so Korven chose to create music with atypical instruments, including the nyckelharpa and the waterphone. He knew that the director liked to retain a degree of creative control, so he relied on loose play centred on improvisation "so that Eggers could move notes around whenever he wanted".

Themes

According to analysts, who? the film transcends the traditional horror genre and enters a potential new category, nicknamed "elevated horror." Its impact is delivered not through scares, but by the effect of ambience and scenography. This is stylistically represented by the film's use of expressionist lighting, the use of different kinds of camera to draw thematic limits, the editing employed to hide horror from the main sight, and the soundtrack's sonic dissonance accompanying instrumental scenes. Samuel's physically impossible disappearance at the beginning of the film introduces the viewer to the film's atmosphere.

The film's plot orbits around a psychological conflict, using a repressive, patriarchal portrayal of Puritan society and the dark, murderous liberation of the witches. The main female character, Thomasin, harbours worldly desires that differ from those of her conventionally Christian family, yearning for independence, sexuality, acceptance and power. However, while her father and the Christian God fail to fulfil her needs, Satan instead speaks personally to her, offering her earthly satisfaction. Therefore, with the demise of her family and the rejection of the Puritan society, Thomasin joins Satan and the witches, her only alternative, in order to find her long desired control over her own life. Her nudity in the last scene reflects her act of casting out the bonds of her previous society.

The difference between both options, nevertheless, is rendered blurred in an evocation of equal religious extremism. This is first felt in the architecture of the family's own home, which ironically resembles an archetypal witch's cottage itself, hinting the gradual reveal that evil is already installed in them. On the opposite side, Satan's temptation of Thomasin also acquires traits of ideological grooming, slowly alienating her from her family. At the end, despite her newfound cause and ecstatic laugh at the coven, Thomasin has not escaped her previous religiosity, but merely changed its direction, turning to murder in exchange for freedom.

The symbolic conflict between civilization and nature is also present in all the aspects of the film. The family lives next to a dark forest, a place tied to witchcraft in their culture, which underlines the conflict between their civilized, patriarchal religion and the Gothic, wild natural world that surrounds them. The forest, as well as the state of nudity, are associated with monstrosity, with the untamed wilderness where the forbidden liberation and sexuality emerge. Accordingly, Caleb returns nude after being seduced by the witch, the witches themselves perform their acts while naked, and Thomasin eventually adopts this code upon joining them. At the end of the film, nature triumphs over its adversary, with the Pan-like Black Phillip goring the axe-wielding William in a metaphor of man being consumed by the wild.

Release/Reception/Box Office

The film had its world premiere at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, on January 27, 2015. The film was also screened in the Special Presentations section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, on September 18, 2015. A24 and DirecTV Cinema acquired distribution rights to the film. The film received very positive reactions in advance screenings, so the studios decided to give the film a wide theatrical release in the United States, on February 19, 2016.

The film was released on Blu-ray and digital HD on May 17, 2016, in the United States. The discs' extras include outtakes, audio commentary, a documentary—The Witch: A Primal Folktale, which summarizes the cast and crew's making of the film—and a 30-minute question-and-answer session filmed in Salem, Massachusetts featuring director Eggers, lead actress Anya Taylor-Joy, and historians Richard Trask and Brunonia Barry. A 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray was released on April 23, 2019.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 90% based on 328 reviews, with an average rating of 7.8/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "As thought-provoking as it is visually compelling, The Witch delivers a deeply unsettling exercise in slow-building horror that suggests great things for debuting writer-director Robert Eggers." Metacritic reports a weighted average score of 83 out of 100, based on 46 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C–" on an A+ to F scale, while PostTrak reported filmgoers gave it a 55% overall positive score and a 41% "definite recommend".

Writing in Variety, Justin Chang commented that "A fiercely committed ensemble and an exquisite sense of historical detail conspire to cast a highly atmospheric spell in The Witch, a strikingly achieved tale of a mid-17th-century New England family's steady descent into religious hysteria and madness." Yohana Desta of Mashable stated that The Witch is a "stunningly crafted experience that'll have you seeking out a church as soon as you leave the theatre". Peter Travers, in his Rolling Stone review, gave the film 3½ stars, and wrote of the film: "Building his film on the diabolical aftershocks of Puritan repression, Eggers raises The Witch far above the horror herd. He doesn't need cheap tricks. Eggers merely directs us to look inside." Stephanie Zacharek summarized the movie in Time as "a triumph of tone", writing that "Although Eggers is extremely discreet—the things you don't see are more horrifying than those you do—the picture's relentlessness sometimes feels like torment." Gregory Wakeman, writing for CinemaBlend, rated it five stars, writing that "its acting, lighting, music, writing, production design, cinematography, editing, and direction all immediately impress. While, at the same time, they combine to create an innately bewitching tale that keeps you on tenterhooks all the way up until its grandiose but enthralling finale." Ann Hornaday wrote in The Washington Post that the film joins the ranks of horror films such as The Exorcist, The Omen, and Rosemary's Baby, saying that The Witch "comports itself less like an imitator of those classics than their progenitor... 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." Independent filmmaker Jay Bauman of RedLetterMedia named it his favourite film of 2016, and when discussing it enthusiastically claimed "I love it, I think it's a masterpiece... It's a first-time filmmaker which is shocking to me... because it feels like it's made by someone who's been making movies for decades who's a master of their craft".

However, some critics as well as audiences were less pleased with the film; Ethan Sacks, of the New York Daily News, wrote that while the film does not suffer from the cinematography, acting, or setting, early on it "seems that The Witch is tapping a higher metaphor for coming of age...or religious intolerance...or man's uneasy balance with nature...or something. It doesn't take long into the film's hour and a half running time, however, to break that spell." Critics have noted that the film has received backlash from audiences regarding the film's themes and slow approach to horror; Lesley Coffin criticized A24, saying it was "a huge mistake" to market The Witch as a terrifying horror film: "Not because it doesn't fit into the genre of horror, but because of the power of expectations. The less you know about this movie the better your experience will be, but everyone who saw it opening weekend probably walked in with too much knowledge and hype to really get as much out of it as they could have if the film had the veil of mystery."

HitFix writer Chris Eggertson was critical of mainstream Hollywood; he said that The Witch "got under [his] skin profoundly", though he argued that it "did not have the moment-to-moment, audience-pleasing shocks that moviegoers have become accustomed to thanks to movies like Sinister and The Purge and Paranormal Activity and every other Blumhouse and Platinum Dunes title in the canon."

Horror authors Stephen King and Brian Keene both reacted positively towards the film; King tweeted significant praise for the film, stating, "The Witch scared the hell out of me. And it's a real movie, tense and thought-provoking as well as visceral", while Keene, on social media, stated, "The Witch is a gorgeous, thoughtful, scary horror film that 90% of the people in the theatre with you will be too stupid to understand."

The Witch grossed $25.1 million in the United States and Canada and $15.3 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $40.4 million.

In North America, pre-release tracking suggested that the film would gross $5–7 million from 2,046 theatres in its opening weekend, trailing fellow newcomer Risen ($7–12 million projection) but similar to opener Race ($4–7 million projection). The film grossed $3.3 million on its first day and $8.8 million in its opening weekend, finishing fourth at the box office behind Deadpool ($56.5 million), Kung Fu Panda 3 ($12.5 million) and Risen ($11.8 million).

Budget $4 million

Box office $40.4 million

My Review

Sometimes you can't believe what you're seeing in a cineplex that will more than likely only show the latest from the major studios. A film like The Witch or most other films from the studio A24 - mostly (if not all) done independently and then picked up for distribution - such as Under the Skin or Springbreakers, would normally be relegated to some art-house theater where not many people could see it. But unlike some distributors who think in only day-and-date theatrical/VOD (or just VOD only), A24 puts something like The Witch as basically a mainstream release (needless to say I saw the trailer for months, many times, in front of big horror and other releases). But I love that a film that goes for being all about simply scaring you by its brooding imagery, period dialog and actors who you won't know unless you have every cast member of Game of Thrones memorized (hint, it's the parents), gets to be seen by so many people. It's not about silly jump scares or characters who are idiots... well, not in the sense of the usual teenagers, but let's get to what I mean.

This is all about witchcraft, but it's also not the simple 'riding around on broomsticks' shenanigans or anything that comes close to being jokey. Filmmaker Robert Eggers (which is all the more astonishing as it's the director's *debut*) suffuses his actors and crew into a setting that is unmistakably 17th century New England, and it's from here everything else can be conjured up. His story follows a family of Puritans from England who are cast out from their community (we don't know why, no real need to, except that the father and mother are, to say the least, very religious, even for the Puritans!) They set up a farm and are preparing for a long season until they can grow their crops. They have a bunch of kids, an teenage daughter, an adolescent boy, two twins and a baby. Right at the start the baby is taken by... who? What?

Sometimes having some ambiguity can work in a film's favor to make the horror from the story and place even more potent. There's not too much ambiguity with The Witch (unless someone wants to warp around things to their liking, or found something I don't know), and it's clear: there is some real heavy-duty black magic going on in the nearby woods, and whether the spirits (in human and animal form) come to the family because they're religious or just because they're evil beings that like to slather themselves with blood is a little more open to interpretation. And in less confident hands it could have become schlocky or unconvincing, set in a period so that either monotonous imagery could unfold (it could have easily been a too-hard-to-take pace wise effort) or all about the special gore effects.

Eggers finds the sweet middle ground, and creates a portrait of a family undone by their own religious fervor, while also being true to what were, at the time, historical accounts of witchcraft. Whether those carried much creedence, Eggers doesn't care - he commits to showing these woods and showing something like a goat or even an apple as something deathly serious, and yet loaded with significance. He doesn't move the camera around like crazy, and of course he doesn't need or should have to: the production design is among the greatest in any horror film, not to mention the certain color palette that he and DP Blaschke give to every shot so that it's like the world is drained of color - grays are even grayer, browns dirtier, and blacks somehow much blacker. It's a serious, darkly directed film, but there's always an intensity about it that doesn't make it ponderous to a point that takes one out of the movie.

A large part to why the film is so effective and chilling is the acting. The main adults (Ineson and Dickie, rarely below a 10 emotionally speaking, though Dickie has the trickier role as the one who has to try, up to a point, to keep his wits about him) are very strong here, both playing variations on God-petrified mortals, but the movie for me really belongs to Anya Taylor-Joy (her first major movie role, expect to see her in many things to come) and Scrimshaw as Caleb.

For the former, she has to carry many scenes all based on why she is a trustworthy person, and she sells it, while for the latter, this boy, it's a role that needs someone to play the period dialog (which is only occasionally obfuscated by the accents) and having to be genuinely scared to death when faced with the evils in the woods. When you have characters who are both "simple" folk of the Lord while also being capable of being twisted by the same dark forces they can't escape, you need people to sell it. They all do, to lengths not unlike out of Polanski at his fiercest.

So combine a filmmaker who wants to make Dread with a capital D his priority, a setting and location and things like just a barn or a door that feel eerie and ominous, and actors who dig in to characters who could very well destroy one another due to their fears (except for Thomasin), and you got a unique genre piece that works just as well as drama as horror, if not better. 8/10!!!