‘The Witch favours insidious dread over cheap shocks’

The Witch is a slow film, a sincere film, accumulating atmosphere one shiver at a time. The wind whistles, the farmyard animals grunt and the birds caw; the score, all caterwauling cellos and choral chants, is the Devil’s orchestra – the sonic equivalent of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Goat dimension

But after all the suggestion, shadows and shudders, Eggers is not afraid to show and tell, and demonstrates a neat knack for composing nightmare images. One involves a goat, another a raven: Satanic staples both but here treated in ways that are anything but hoary. The climax, too, pours new blood from old bottles, and is scary enough to mute arguments that Eggers might have done better to not sacrifice ambiguity for full-throttle terror. (As John Carpenter said when asked about embracing showstopping visuals with The Thing after the purist suspense of Halloween, when you’ve got something this good, you don’t hide it.)

The Witch is perhaps too slow and its dialogue too archly archaic for it to be this year’s crossover horror hit a la It Follows, but if you like the thought of The Exorcist taking place in Terrence Malick’s The New World, then this is for you. It certainly rewards patience, and all credit to Eggers and his cast for sticking to their beliefs. The performances, like the direction, are unswerving in their conviction, and special mention should go to Anya Taylor-Joy as Thomasin. A real find, her pale face demands scrutiny – blank and expressive, guileless and cunning – just as her changing body mesmerises Caleb. The Witch is, after all, a prologue to the Salem witch trials, so it is correct that an unhealthy fear of female sexuality should be stirred into the brew of religious fundamentalism and plain old cabin fever. It’s Eggers’ ability to keep the lid on all this bubbling hysteria until the very moment he wants it to blow sky-high that makes The Witch so effective.

THE VERDICT Robert Eggers’ measured, meticulous debut builds into one of the most genuinely scary horror movies of recent years.

› Certificate 15 Director Robert Eggers Starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Katie Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw Screenplay Robert Eggers Distributor Universal Running time 93 mins