The Witch

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Rob Babcock

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The Witch
« on: 28 Feb 2016, 04:49 am »
This is kind of a weird and tricky movie for me to review; basically I didn't really like it but I kind of feel guilty about it.  The film has a lot of superb elements but taken as a whole I found it to be unsatisfying.  Some spoilers ahead.

I'll start with the good. The movie has a superb cast!  Most of them are pretty much unknowns, at least to me.  The film is set in New England about 70 years before the Salem Witch Trials.  It's the story of a family who's patriarch is very very rigid in his religious convictions, so much so that he's cast of his community for irritating the community leaders with his insistence that they follow his strict Calvinist doctrines.  The family of seven moves out to homestead a plot of land abutting a large dark forest.  Almost immediately things sour for the family.  The crops don't really come in and things are very lean (part of this is that the father doesn't seem to be a very gifted farmer).  Then one day the eldest daughter, Thomasin is playing with the newborn baby near the edge of the forest.  She opens her eyes and the infant has literally vanished into the wind.  A week of searching yields no clues.  From here things spiral downward as the forest seems to come alive to torment them.

Anya Taylor-Joy is terrific as Thomasin and Harvey Scrimshaw is great as her slightly-younger brother Caleb.  The parents are played by a couple of GoT actors, Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie.  The youngest siblings are very well cast and quite creepy, truth be told.  There's a wonderful subtext/subplot in the film about Caleb's pangs of longing and lust for his beautiful sister Thomasin; she's coming of age and of course they're out in the middle of nowhere with no other kids their age.  Both actors are very gifted, particularly Scrimshaw given his youth.  They're very compelling and have convincing chemistry together.  His curiosity and longing and her reactions would have been interesting to explore but the film doesn't really go far in addressing it.

Great pains were taken to make the setting realistic. I read that the director had all of the houses and huts built by hand with tools accurate to the period. Further a lot of the dialog is reputed to have been lifted verbatim from contemporary sources.  This is a mixed bag; on the one hand it makes things more authentic and adds a layer of mystery. But it's also a bit annoying to try to follow.  The cinematography is stellar with a muted color palette that makes even  the innocent scenes in the forest very foreboding.

*** SPOILER ALERT! *** The huge problem though that The Witch has is, well, the witch. We see her fifteen minutes into the film, performing dark and sadistic rituals as she slaughters the stolen infant.  It would have been a wonderful and provocative exploration of sexism, religion, gender roles and how this feeds into mass hysteria of the kind that fuels things like witch hunts.  Except that the witch is actually real.  There really is no tension except to see just how the next family member will be brutally butchered.  And although it's supposed to be terrifying the scene with Black Phillip, the family goat, is straight out of a Monty Python movie, unintentionally hilarious rather than frightening. 

I was also annoyed with the soundtrack.  It is eerie but it's way too intrusively modern, completely out of place in the film.  It's also a bit ham-fisted, devoid of subtlety.  Used properly music should add a layer of tension to an already tense situation. But here the soundtrack is almost like the flashing light in the studio telling the audience to laugh.  I felt like the music was being used as a lazy shortcut to create angst where the story didn't yet warrant it.

And as well cast as the film was I really hated Kate Dickie.  She's a fine actress but her character was almost exactly the same as the one she played in GoT.  It was painful watching that shrill shrew of a character being cut and pasted from that series to this movie.  I think that if she ever plays this character again she'll never get any other kind of role.  It really brought the film down IMO (again, she's a fine actress but casting her here was probably a mistake).

I could forgive some of that but the ending was an utter waste of the entire film.  When Thomasin finally decides to 'sign the book' and join with Black Phillip is doesn't feel like a repudiation of the patriarchy or the Calvinist religious order at all, it feels like naked coercion.  After all, her entire family is savagely butchered before her very eyes!  You can make a case that her parents had it coming but her beloved brother?  Her five year old siblings?  The several month old infant?  Yet Thomasin is elated.  It's quite a stretch to me.

*** /END SPOILERS ***

There are so many things about the film to admire that I really regret finding so little to love.  I'm curious to hear feedback from any AC'er that goes to see it as well.

« Last Edit: 28 Feb 2016, 07:22 am by Rob Babcock »