The Witch (2015)

Movie: The Witch (2015), directed by Robert Eggers

Watched on: Showtime

Ran: 7.06 miles, 9’06”/mile, 01:04:16 (recovery run)

 

In case it wasn’t totally obvious by now, I live under a rock. It’s a cozy rock, nothing fancy, but it has a “ROCK SWEET ROCK” embroidery on its face and protects me from seeing or hearing anything about what any of you humans are up to, so I like it and it’s mine.

 

What this means, of course, is that I frequently find myself in amusing circumstances like the following: “Oh hey, let’s see if there are any good horror movies I can run to on Showtime: seen it; [swipe] seen it; [swipe] looks dumb; [swipe] …hmmm, “The Witch.” Sounds kinda generic, maybe another time. Oh, wait, it expires TODAY? Okay, guess I’ll give it a shot, whatever. How bad could it be?” And that, friends, is how I finally came to watch a movie that some have called the greatest horror film of the current millennium, that others have dubbed the apotheosis of the genre, and that I personally might have heard mentioned once or twice but I may be thinking of something else.

 

So: The Witch. It’s about a 17th-century English family who gave up their well-to-do life to emigrate to the Plymouth colonies and has recently been banished by the elders over some religious dispute. So William and Katherine take their kids Thomasin, Caleb, and twins Mercy and Jonas and set up a little farm on the edge of the Big Evil Woods™, where Katherine has another baby, Samuel. One day, while Thomasin is playing peekaboo with little Sam, the baby just disappears in a really impossible and disquieting fashion, and that’s when this little game of life switches from HARD mode to NIGHTMARE. Katherine is understandably inconsolable, on top of the family’s other woes: William feels increasing stress to provide for his family, the adolescent Thomasin feels unjustly blamed for Sam’s disappearance, Caleb feels like he’s being treated like a little kid, there’s drama about a missing silver cup (Thomasin is low-key blamed when in fact William secretly sold it to buy traps in hopes of catching meat for the family), and the twins are acting out, as young twins are won’t to do, I guess.

 

Where is the witch in all this, you ask? Well, we do see her onscreen after Sam is taken, but the glimpses are fleeting and it’s uncertain whether we’re meant to take them as literal truth or as a representation of what the family fears; most of the film is like that, and one could make the argument for an interpretation utterly devoid of any supernatural presence or actual-factual witch at all, in which the family’s downfall is due entirely to their own interpersonal suspicions, lies, and communication breakdowns, colored ever darker by their religious beliefs. But yeah, that said, we do see the witch doing horrifying things to little Samuel—and then seducing young Caleb in the woods, after which he is found alone, naked, and ill. Meanwhile, the twins are also holding conversations with a goat named Black Phillip, which isn’t at all suspicious or anything.

 

Anyway, it’s not long before the family is accusing Thomasin of being a witch and the ultimate cause of the family’s problems (sure, blame the teen), whereas she feels compelled to defend herself by accusing the twins, what with their Black Phillip games and all. We’ll leave off the narrative there, because that’s when the real fun begins. I’m probably not spoiling anything to say that if you’re a happy-endings kind of person, maybe give this one a miss.

 

As you no doubt already know (unless you, too, are a rock-dweller—hi there! Let’s get coffee after the next club meeting), The Witch is a damn fine film. Critics absolutely lost their minds over it, heaping praise on it like they were hucking cheese on their baked russet at the potato bar. Moviegoers, on the other hand, had mixed feelings; apparently The Witch was marketed as a straight-up horror movie, which is most decidedly is not, so people expecting lots of jump scares, gore, heads twisting around, and kids spider-crawling on the ceiling were disappointed. The Witch is more a 90-minute art-house exercise in the painstaking building of a psychological bonfire, which finally gets lit in the final act. In hindsight I took it as a study in family dynamics, trust issues, and the ways in which people can be subtly set against each other, especially if someone might be, say, grooming a young teen for any of a number of nefarious reasons. (By the time the credits roll, you might have a different idea of the identity of the witch in the title.)

 

If you’re a film buff who likes horror, you’d be sure to love this—but who am I kidding? You’ve already seen it. If you’re more a genre horror fan, you might be a little bored by the lack of machetes and hockey masks, but if you adjust your expectations, there’s a lot to like. The look and feel of The Witch is off the hook (apparently they only used sunlight and candles for lighting, I mean COME ON), everyone in the cast is stunningly good, the story is slow-moving but gripping, and the sparing use of horror imagery is very effective. I don’t think I found the movie quite as scary as some others—Stephen King famously said it scared the hell out of him—but if you don’t get at least a little creeped out watching it, you’re dead inside.

 

Incidentally, The Witch still appears on Showtime and the expiration date no longer shows up (not sure what that was about), so check it out there if you’re so inclined. Climbing back under my rock now. I recently added some moss on its north face; it’s nice.