.
Robert Eggers’ first feature film and the production that introduced the world to the talents of Anya Taylor-Joy The Witch: A New England Folktale is my kind of horror movie.
The Witch centers on a 16th century family that had crossed the Atlantic Ocean with a colony
A24 Studios
only to find themselves exiled from the plantation for their overly strict interpretation of scripture. On their isolated farm on the edge of a vast and wile forest the family is tormented by the ‘witch of the wood,’ going mad and turning upon each other.
The film is a slow-burn eschewing bloody gore and jump scares for methodical grinding tension and paranoia. Everything that occurs in the story feels ‘off’ and even simple hares imbue scenes with dread and foreboding. The Witch is not for everyone, in addition to a measured pace without explicit violence every ten minutes the dialog presented is authentic 16th century English, comprehensible to modern audiences but requiring a greater focus and attention.
The film’s dedication to period production design helps craft a nearly perfect illusion that the audience is witnessing events from the 16th century. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke’s excellent use of only period light sources, lanterns and candles, also adds greatly to not only the realism of the setting but the mood of building fear with so little of the frame fully visible. The music score by composer Mark Korven utilizes choirs and ascending scales that is discordant and continually building with clear resolution perfectly mirror the pace of the story.
The cast is uniformly great, along with Anya Taylor-Joy in the lead as teenager Thomasin, the film has Ralph Ineson as the father William, prideful and stubborn in his faith, Kate Dickie as the mother who loses all grip on reality as her family disintegrates, along with a collection talented young actor portraying the younger children.
The Witch played October 4th as part of AMC’s Thrills and Chills from A24. The rest of the month includes on 11th Ty West’s X, on the 18th Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin and concluding on the 25th with Ari Aster’s modern folk horror Midsommar.
