by Peter Callaghan

Deep in the woods beyond the golden corn

A witch takes flight when son from mother torn

If you go down to the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise. Especially if you’re William (Ralph Ineson), the father of a New England family who on account of some unspoken sin is banished from a Puritan plantation to a remote cabin by the woods where his newborn babe is snatched in broad daylight by a gnarled hand and ground by pestle and mortar into a witches brew, his eldest son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) is like Tam O’Shanter entranced by a “winsome wench and “waullie” whose crimson “cuttie-sark” leads him to an early grave and the remainder of his family (Kate Dickie as his shrewish wife Katherine, Anya Taylor-Joy as their eldest daughter Thomasin and Ellie Grainger and Lucas Dawson as the meddlesome twins Mercy and Jonas) engage in a Texas Tornado death match until, as Christopher Lambert famously said in The Highlander, “there can be only one”. One what though, is the question. Witch? Cauldron ingredient? Reason for a sequel? Either way, it’s a picnic time for the teddy bears!

Although The Witch (subtitled A New English Folktale) by writer and debut feature director Robert Eggers contains many of the typical characteristics of a classic horror film including a wooden cabin, an eerie forest, deranged animals and things that go bump in the night, with its mix of supernatural forces controlling the characters’ fates and false accusations fuelling hysteria, it is more like Macbeth and The Crucible than Oculus and The Babadook. Which is fitting, given that the film is set around the time of the Salem witch hunts and according to the closing credits much of the dialogue comes “directly from period journals, diaries, and court records”. When the darkness descends and the body count rises, William hesitantly reassures one of his remaining children, “We will conquer this wilderness; it will not consume us.” But what the wilderness is, and why and how it consumes, is of greater interest and more central to proceedings than the nuts and bolts of hammy acting, cheap thrills and plot twists, which form the backbone of most horrors.

For those who adore the gore, and believe that no fright night is complete until you jump out of your seat, a few words of warning: The Witch makes you think about, not shrink from, the action; the action when it comes (in the form of a pecking raven, a horned goat and a startled hare) is sparing and suggestive rather than strung-out and sign-posted; and with the exception of the final scene which follows the Monty Python mantra of “And now for something completely different”, authenticity trumps the fantastical. I loved it; or, rather, I respected it. The longer it went on, the deeper I fell under Robert Eggers’ spell. Yes, it’s about witchcraft and religion and things that go bump in the night; but like Macbeth and The Crucible it’s also about man’s fall from grace, temptation and sin, fear and suspicion, scaremongering and (quite literally) scapegoating in the form of the cloven-hoofed Black Phillip who as the devil incarnate lures the impressionable Thomasin into the woods with the leading question of “What dost thou want?” I know what I want: more horror films of this depth and subtlety which appeal to the intellect as much to the senses and are all the more enjoyable for avoiding B-movie cliches and A-list celebrities.

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Peter Callaghan
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