The Witch: Hurawatch

The Witch: Hurawatch

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The Witch," marks the debut of writer-director Robert Eggers. The film is classified as a period drama/horror and carefully markets itself as “a New England folktale” rather than a fairy tale. Fairy's tales, fundamentally, are stories crafted to impart lessons or morals. “The Witch,” a feminist tale centered on an American colonial family that appears to be going through a supernatural curse, resembles more of a sermon. A sermon encourages us to reflect on our life and tells riddled figurative stories that inspire contemplation, as one character does using the Book of Job (more on Job shortly). But “The Witch” isn’t a morality tale in the traditional sense. It is an ensemble drama about a family with no faith who were on the brink of self-destruction. It is also about women—the stress of the patriarchy that leads to their disenfranchisement.

For an extended period of time, the audience does not know which character does the focus of the film the Witch. It is likely not Katherine the grieving mother who is played by Kate Dickie, although Eggers has a lot of focus on her mourning of the infant son Samuel who vanishes under mysterious circumstances. Furthermore, it is definitely not Katherine’s mischievous young twins Jonas and Mercy played by Lucas Dawson and Ellie Grainger respectively, although Mercy also represents her and her brother's ignorance to proper behavior after being cast out into the terrifying woods with their family. The most likely contender directed to William Ralph Ineson who portrays Katherine’s troubled husband. It might also be her eldest son Caleb Harvey Scrimshaw, the eager son trying to protect his father from his mother’s ire.

More often than not however, “The Witch” focuses on Thomasin Anya Taylor-Joy, the eldest child of Katherine and William amongst five children. The rest of the children accompanying her are still young and need to mature. Thomasin begins her journey to womanhood under the encountering stares of her family, but to be fair, they do not have all too much of a reason to care about her considering crops are failing, resources are thin, and Samuel is still nowhere to be found.

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Despite this, Thomasin bears the overwhelming stress of her family’s worries: her younger siblings seek solace from her, and she doesn’t want to carry the burden, especially after her mother forces her to do more chores than the rest of her family. There are several other storylines in “The Witch,” but all of them lead to Thomasin. That’s the beauty of Eggers’s sprawling narrative: it’s not only about the suffocated existence of women in a patriarchal world, but the brutal reality that extreme solitude can foster ill will and deep self-loathing.

In this light, “The Witch'' qualifies as an anti-parable. Eggers does guide her through the woods eventually, but he is deliberate in the way he clears the path. This feels at times like an unreal Pinterized ‘The Crucible’, because it depicts a man’s desperate, isolating struggle not to think deeply about what troubles him. It takes a long time for Thomasin’s clan to even entertain the idea that a witch or some demonic enchantment is causing all of their problems. But eventually it does happen. Up until that point there are only signs and portents: a particularly bloodshot eye here, an imperiously agitated goat, a hyper twitchy hare, and some rather voluble crows there. Thomasin’s family do eventually embody their fears of nature, an uneasiness bred from instinctively, and rest assured gendered as feminine. And with that, the family’s mundane, everyday problems, which almost all stem from the fact that their land appears to be cursed, takes the form of a fairy tale witch.

That brings us back to Job. In The Book of Job, God inflicts suffering upon Job simply to test his faith. God must exist and, for some divine or other Mysterious reason, has motivation to try Job. But until God’s plague is cast upon Job’s body, he doesn’t doubt that there’s a reason for his suffering. The same goes for William and his family, basically. He’s able to go about his life and conduct business until, for some reason, his family gets driven to the point of going for each other’s throats. As a result, when you watch “The Witch,” you often seem to struggle to grasp the premise of the film. But the film’s title is in itself a big giveaway: this is a fantasy of power, albeit a twisted sort of magic.

I talk a lot about the premise of “The Witch” without discussing how well it’s executed. Partly because the movie is so captivating from the jump, I found myself giving into it way too early and had no choice but get wrapped up in it.

Eggers' intricately designed camerawork reminds me of the portraits painted by Vermeer as well as the landscape paintings of Andrew Wyeth (there’s also an overriding allusion to one of Francisco Goya’s more famous paintings, but I can’t tell you which one without spoiling a surprise). The inviting atmosphere blended with the somber tone is created through the paradoxical mood intricately designed by sound and editing, one that is warm yet melancholic. Captivating “The Witch” so thoroughly that the audience is unaware that the creators have been showing the destination the entire time.