Wearing its art film standing as a badge of honor, The Witch succeeds in thumbing its nose at the conventional horror genre. Replete with oblique period dialogue and actors often seemingly bent on delivering lines in a manner to further obscure comprehension rather than clarify it, The Witch isn’t an easy go. What makes it worthwhile is an uncanny sense of craftsmanship from director Robert Eggers. What makes it rather stunning is the emergence of actress Anya Taylor-Joy as Thomasin, who is beginning to “blossom as a woman”–not a good thing in New England in the 1630s.. Thomason is gradually suspected of witchcraft by her pious family after her younger brother, baby Samuel, suddenly disappears while under her care during a game of peek-a-boo.
Thomasin is the film’s focal point. As she becomes a reluctant catalyst to a hardening of tormented tolerance into full-blown vengeful paranoia, it’s easy to identify with her frustrations. An innocent provocative comment to her younger siblings about jokingly being a witch herself becomes an eventual tipping point in a family’s descent into hysteria.
A word about the dilagoue, reportedly pulled from Olde English documents of the early seventeenth century: imagine a largely incoherent Tom Hardy in both The Revanant and The Dark Knight Rises. Multiply by two or three. What would not be a problem if this were an Elizabethan period piece borders on pomposity in a horror film.
What keeps Eggers from going off the grid is a precise eye for set design and costuming and a good ear for the huge role that music plays in the horror genre. Taylor-Joy is a pure delight to behold, her buoyant innocence contrasted against the doom and gloom of The Puritan era. The Devil’s up-close presence in this world is as real as Donald Drumpf’s imprint on the present-day presidential campaign. Eggers may be going for a spooky, atmospherics-laden slow-burn with a little of The Excorcist on the side, but the killer effect is he’s painting a full fledge sneak-up-on-you Hieronymous Bosch. Without its playful ending, The Witch would likely be accused of being a mere academic exercise with genre trappings. As it stands, it’s the best thinking-man’s horror flick since The Babadook.