Scary, satisfying and chilling
THEY SAY THE DARKEST HOUR IS RIGHT BEFORE THE DAWN
Life in 1630s New England wasn’t pretty. The Enlightenment, even by the most generous reckoning, was still a few decades away. Puritan colonists, eking out a hardscrabble existence, were tantalized by the memories of luxuries they’d left behind; things like glass, silver, apples and properly domesticated animals. It’s no wonder that business went down in Salem.
But the witch trials wouldn’t happen for another 60 years. In writer/director Robert Eggers’ superbly creepy first feature The Witch ( nicely rendered in posters as The VVitch: A New England Folktale), one pious family has to stand alone against an evil enchantress, without even a single self-appointed judiciary to help them.
William and Katherine (Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie) have just been expelled from a Puritan colony for being, of all things, too Christian. With their five children in tow, they set up a homestead on the edge of an imposing forest. But hard on the heels of being banished, they find that their baby boy Samuel has vanished, spirited away by an evil force.
The disappearance itself is handled with a camera trick as old as the moving picture, yet Eggers uses editing (including judicious blackouts), sound design — a female choir with a collective voice like the Monolith in 2001 — and perfect pacing to craft a palpable sense of dread. You may not believe in witches today, but you may well leave the film certain they roamed the earth 400 years ago.
Anya Taylor-Joy, another firsttimer and a natural at the craft, plays Thomasin, the family’s eldest daughter, who was with Samuel when he disappeared. A headstrong girl on the verge of womanhood, she teases her younger siblings, telling them she is herself a witch — a joke that may return to haunt her, perhaps even literally. She has a closer bond with brother Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), to whom she is closer in age.
Losing a child is calamity enough, but the family has other travails. William isn’t much of a farmer — though he is a deft hand at hewing wood — and must take to the wilderness in search of game. But the forest is full of weird portents, some of which follow the family back to their homestead. Bloody eggs and goats’ milk suggest an imminent rash of plagues.
Eggers grounds his tale in little details and linguistic flourishes — “Fain would I tell thee” is a typical opening of a conversation — to transport us back in time, bonding us to the terrified colonists for whom the supernatural and the natural were but opposite sides of a thin coin held in their hands.
In 1630, the darkness of night was absolute, as were the gaps in knowledge as to what might await one in the woods. The pace of life was slower too, but that just means horror could creep up on one more deliberately and calculatingly.
Eggers knows all this and makes the most of it. The Witch won the directing award when it premièred at the Sundance film festival last year, and has been marinating ever since. It couldn’t get any scarier, more satisfying or chilling. ∂∂∂½