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Films of the week: A supernatural horror and soul-searching sci-fi
BARRY DIDCOCK
THE WITCH
Film 4, Saturday, 11.50pm
ROBERT Eggers’s most recent film, 2019’s The Lighthouse, was loosely based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Shot in moody black and white, it starred Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as 19th-century lighthouse keepers going out of their minds and turning murderous in a remote New England lighthouse.
The Witch is the young American director’s 2015 debut, and it is equally bleak, moody, tense and intense.
Not for nothing is it screening in Film 4’s Saturday Night Shocks series, though here Eggers ranges even farther back in time for a story set among the English puritans who settled New England in the 1630s.
Ralph Ineson is William, a scripture-quoting settler who has been banished along with his family from the main puritan plantation.
We never learn why. He has built a hut and a barn in a clearing in the woods but his crops have failed and he has little with which to feed his family – wife Kate (Kate Dickie) and children Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson), and new-born baby Sam. The only other living creatures are the family’s evillooking black billy goat (it features in a key scenes towards the end of the film), the family dog and a hare that appears from time to time.
When baby Sam disappears from his cradle, apparently taken by wolves, things turn even worse for William.
Kate is distraught and accuses Thomasin of having stolen a silver goblet.
When Caleb returns from the woods naked and apparently cursed having set off to hunt for food, William turns on Thomasin too, accusing her of being a witch. Amid denouncement, threats and visions that may or may not be real, the tension mounts.
Eggers shot the film using only natural light and, for the interior scenes, candles, giving everything a gloomy, beige wash which is perfect for this low-budget folk-horror. With the exception of Leeds-born Ineson the northern English accents are all pretty ropey, but there’s a bravura performance from Taylor-Joy, who would go on to star in Peaky Blinders and Netflix hit The Queen’s
Gambit and land the title role in Autumn de Wilde’s pleasing 2020 Austen romp, Emma.
THE MIDNIGHT SKY
Netflix
Now streaming
Opening in February 2049 in a scene set three weeks after some unspecified event has set in train the destruction of the world’s population, this stately sci-fi romance is adapted from the novel Good Morning, Midnight by American writer Lily Brooks-Dalton and directed by George Clooney, who also stars. Clooney plays Augustine Lofthouse, a terminally ill scientist at a remote Arctic station who refuses to leave when everyone else does.
His colleagues want to return home to die with their families but as Lofthouse says, “here is as good as anywhere”.
He drinks, listens to music and plays chess against himself but then, realising that there is one remaining space mission on its way back to earth, he undertakes to contact its crew and warn them not to return.
The craft is the Aether, an exploration ship led by Commander Adewole (David Oyelowo) and his pregnant partner Sully (Felicity Jones), the ship’s doctor.
Accompanying the events in the present day, Augustine’s own story is told in flashback. We see him as a young scientist expounding on the possibilities of life on other planets and we see his first fateful encounter with Jean Sullivan (Sophie Rundle), the woman with whom he will have a daughter, though by then the couple are estranged. (In the scene in which they first meet, Sullivan recommends Portobello beach as a beautiful spot “just off the coast of Edinburgh”, a description that will puzzle anyone who didn’t need to catch a ferry to get there. Which is everyone who has ever been there).
Thematically, the film has some of the feel of Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s Oscar-winning 2016 film Arrival, which was based on Ted Chiang’s heart-rending novella Story Of Your Life, and on Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s cult film Solaris, itself an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel.
That, too, featured Clooney mooching around a near-empty environment, in that case a spaceship, though two decades on his lone hold-out isn’t clean shaven and handsome but grey, grizzled and bearded, quaffing bourbon then hooking himself up to the dialysis machine which is keeping him alive. Accomplished, meditative and, ultimately, redemptive.