The Witch

Initially, The Witch seems like a spin-off of Shyamalan’s The Village, but it eventually turns out to be a horror movie that goes beyond genre formulas and doesn’t want to be just another An American Haunting. Remarkable for its use of old British English (that perhaps even Brits themselves do not understand without subtitles), the film attempts to portray the mentality of the characters in a period-authentic way, but these characters’ behavior and responses lead to some solutions that the audience might find unsatisfactory. It is very hard to root for characters who are so fanatic in their religion that they spend more time hysterically praying among themselves and screaming confessions at each other than they do normally conversing. Rather, I wished their fates were finally sealed. Especially because in the second half, the film focuses more on their uncontrollable psychosis than the threat of the witch herself. The film is incoherent in its delivery of the events and their justifications, or you could say that it has a strange (witch-like?) logic. But the atmosphere is dense and the young Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays the only normal character in the film, is a promising newcomer. (08/06/2015)

After the trailer, I was hoping to be delighted by The Witch. In the end, it is only rather inconspicuously, mildly concerning because of the excess of religion and one established witchcraft cult in New England. The movie actually doesn’t contain anything innovative and so there is only one thing which can entice you. And that is the atmosphere. The atmosphere is definitely brutal, but it doesn’t make up the whole movie. Unfortunately. (05/25/2016)

Eggers has a brilliant way of building atmosphere. The Witch is thus an unobtrusively absorbing film that is completely devoid of cheap genre techniques and formalistic devices. Eggers captures the terror and awe on the part of the pilgrims coming from the world of god-fearing civilization to the world of the wilderness in the seventeenth century and facing psychological decay in a hopeless situation. But in addition to that, it makes viewers experience the same feelings. After the disturbingly relieving climax, you suddenly realise that you are totally wound up and that you never want to go to the petting zoo again. The upcoming The Lighthouse focuses on macho hierarchy and shapes its characters in relation to their pasts as something that they want to escape from. In his debut, The Witch, Eggers carefully maps the dynamics within a family that finds itself in a situation of existential distress, where the past conversely becomes both a delightful myth and a burden exacerbating their situation. Furthermore, Eggers brilliantly captures the essence of witchcraft as a bogeyman, a stigma and a form of liberating relief in a society bound by fanatical devotion to belief. (11/12/2021)

The Witch feels like a film from another planet, or better said, a media from a completely different time. While it accepts contemporary genre tropes and draws its surface tension from the popular formula of a group of people – a cabin, the surrounding forest, and a supernatural evil, internally it sharply defines what we consider common and therefore actually correct in modern horror. The plot focuses not on the true nature and character of the evil, but on the psyche and behaviour of its victims, which, hand in hand with their religious fanaticism, spreads the already terrifying threat into their own ranks, and the viewer can no longer be sure who is the victim and who is the hunter (as the scene with the dog and the rabbit makes clear). It's true that it's hard to sympathise with such irrational characters, but the painstaking work of evoking the period, the orders of life at the time and the Old English language itself add to the naturalism and authenticity in an overwhelming way, so that we actually feel like we're in another reality, even though we're told at the outset that the story is based on an old folk tale. Though the attempt at added historical value may hurt the expected horror content a bit, the formal side is flawless. Sudden edits matched with the hauntingly unmelodic music cut every scene precisely at its climactic moment, so that its effect cannot be diminished, while the setting is used to great effect thanks to slow camera runs and carefully staged shots, without any image that would feel cheap or predictable. We are not forced to be afraid, as we know in today's "scary" ghost stories, but the fear is omnipresent and insistent. In a nutshell: horror that is different, more honest, and better. 80% (03/26/2016)

These a few dozens of seconds were completely unnecessary, without them it could have been the best horror of recent years. But we cannot do anything about it and their presence is even a bigger letdown because the problem is not what they show but how. Anyway, otherwise it is pretty good. You can find here everything what a real old school horror movie should contain; disturbing atmosphere, graduating psycho tension within a closed community (in this case a family in the middle of the woods), exposing carefully written characters, fears, evil and prejudices hidden in us, disturbing scenes... I am completely happy about that; especially when you add the impressive camera à la Dutch masters and acting performances of the whole family, which are worth highlighting, including the children. I can't remember when four children played such a complicated characters so well. Perhaps Eggers will make more horror movies, because a similar approach to this genre has been missing in recent years. (07/12/2015)