Review: The Witch (2016)
Feb. 26th, 2016 09:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glitter_n_goreOne of the reasons I love watching horror movies, especially in the theater, is that everyone is riveted to the screen. In my experience at least, horror audiences contain the fewest texters, chatterboxes, and rustlings of various foodstuffs. If there is talking, it's of the, "Don't go in there!" variety, or everyone scream-laughing at the jump scares.
But this is the first time I've been in an audience that was utterly silent by the time the credits rolled.
No, really. Do NOT go in there.
It's fair to say this is probably the most anticipated horror movie of the year. It certainly got the most buzz out of the circles I follow nowadays, and I'm glad I got the chance to see it in theaters. That trailer had us all preemptively reaching for the covers even though it tells you very little about what to expect. All it conveys is a mood of disquiet and dread, and that dread is what pervades the movie from start to finish.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: fear is extremely subjective. Whether a given movie is "scary" or not will depend on your point of view. Which specific moments of a particular movie scared you the most depends on your own pressure points and individual experience. So the way to bring your audience into the fear of each movie isn't to throw as many conventially creepy things at the screen as possible, but to generate empathy for the characters on the screen. We become rattled and terrified because they are. Their fear becomes our fear. Their disintegrating sense of stability becomes ours, and we are all unmoored in the darkness together.
The protagonists of The Witch are a family of seven, cast out from the nearby village for not following the central religion correctly, or something, it's never really explained, who take up residence at a tiny, practically barren farm on the edge of the woods. The baby disappears during a game of peek-a-boo, with no evidence as to what happened to him. The rest of the movie follows a well-worn pattern of everyone getting more and more desperate in their isolation and poverty, deciding A Witch Did It, and casting blame on one another when things continue to get worse. It's a deceptively quiet movie, with the most noise coming from the oppressive, dissonant score that reminds me most of Stanley Kubrick's 2001. It's that weird, and that unnerving.
The thing is, although a lot of the bad things that happen to this family could all have rational explanations, it's clear from the framing and backdrop that we're meant to believe there are supernatural forces at work in the woods. Just how much those forces can be blamed for what goes wrong here is a little fuzzier. There's a familiar critique of this particular brand of Puritanism, the idea that a child who has done nothing wrong in its life can be condemned to Hell because it hasn't been baptized, it rightly called out as ridiculous, although that is what they're technically supposed to believe. There are a couple of "visitations" that could be explained away as simple nightmares, except they have real-world consequences upon waking.
My only complaint is that because of the period dialect, some of the lines are difficult to understand, especially when it goes by quickly as it does in one gut-wrenching scene that I won't give away for you. I also have a lot of feelings about the ending, which seems both inevitable and kind of ambiguous at the same time. Not open-ended, but I'm not sure how director Robert Eggers wants us to take it. Let's put it this way: I might be adding this movie to my "Dark Coming of Age Stories" list for a future blog post/series, and I'll keep you all updated on whether that winds up happening or not.
Bottom line: this is a tense and uncomfortable watch from start to finish, gorgeously photographed, and exquisitely nerve-jangling. It gets under your skin in a way that's hard to describe unless you've experienced it. You feel like you've gone through the wringer with these people, and are left unsure where to go next. Except, maybe, back into the woods.
But this is the first time I've been in an audience that was utterly silent by the time the credits rolled.
No, really. Do NOT go in there.
It's fair to say this is probably the most anticipated horror movie of the year. It certainly got the most buzz out of the circles I follow nowadays, and I'm glad I got the chance to see it in theaters. That trailer had us all preemptively reaching for the covers even though it tells you very little about what to expect. All it conveys is a mood of disquiet and dread, and that dread is what pervades the movie from start to finish.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: fear is extremely subjective. Whether a given movie is "scary" or not will depend on your point of view. Which specific moments of a particular movie scared you the most depends on your own pressure points and individual experience. So the way to bring your audience into the fear of each movie isn't to throw as many conventially creepy things at the screen as possible, but to generate empathy for the characters on the screen. We become rattled and terrified because they are. Their fear becomes our fear. Their disintegrating sense of stability becomes ours, and we are all unmoored in the darkness together.
The protagonists of The Witch are a family of seven, cast out from the nearby village for not following the central religion correctly, or something, it's never really explained, who take up residence at a tiny, practically barren farm on the edge of the woods. The baby disappears during a game of peek-a-boo, with no evidence as to what happened to him. The rest of the movie follows a well-worn pattern of everyone getting more and more desperate in their isolation and poverty, deciding A Witch Did It, and casting blame on one another when things continue to get worse. It's a deceptively quiet movie, with the most noise coming from the oppressive, dissonant score that reminds me most of Stanley Kubrick's 2001. It's that weird, and that unnerving.
The thing is, although a lot of the bad things that happen to this family could all have rational explanations, it's clear from the framing and backdrop that we're meant to believe there are supernatural forces at work in the woods. Just how much those forces can be blamed for what goes wrong here is a little fuzzier. There's a familiar critique of this particular brand of Puritanism, the idea that a child who has done nothing wrong in its life can be condemned to Hell because it hasn't been baptized, it rightly called out as ridiculous, although that is what they're technically supposed to believe. There are a couple of "visitations" that could be explained away as simple nightmares, except they have real-world consequences upon waking.
My only complaint is that because of the period dialect, some of the lines are difficult to understand, especially when it goes by quickly as it does in one gut-wrenching scene that I won't give away for you. I also have a lot of feelings about the ending, which seems both inevitable and kind of ambiguous at the same time. Not open-ended, but I'm not sure how director Robert Eggers wants us to take it. Let's put it this way: I might be adding this movie to my "Dark Coming of Age Stories" list for a future blog post/series, and I'll keep you all updated on whether that winds up happening or not.
Bottom line: this is a tense and uncomfortable watch from start to finish, gorgeously photographed, and exquisitely nerve-jangling. It gets under your skin in a way that's hard to describe unless you've experienced it. You feel like you've gone through the wringer with these people, and are left unsure where to go next. Except, maybe, back into the woods.