Review: In The Witch, Humanity is the Devil

The Witch, writer-director Robert Eggers’ Satanist-approved debut, turns the traditional witch-persecution narrative on its head. Set nearly 400 years ago in Puritan New England, The Witch takes place decades before the infamous Salem witch trials swept the region with rampant accusations of witchcraft. In a sense, The Witch is telling the opposite story—not one of societal persecution of “the other,” but the disintegration of one isolated family facing the supernatural.

After being expelled from their community due to a religious disagreement, a family of seven sets out on their own, settling on a small farm surrounded by the woods. Almost immediately upon their arrival, their baby vanishes near the woods while out with their oldest daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy).

As the deeply religious father William (Ralph Ineson) and wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) attempt to process the disappearance of their newborn baby, the family’s situation quickly becomes more precarious. Their son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) soon also vanishes in the woods surrounding the farm, which raises accusations from all sides. The inseparable young siblings Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson) believe Thomasin is to blame, after she angrily claims she is a witch in order to frighten Mercy, while their increasingly panicked mother seems distrustful of everyone. Matters only escalate when Caleb suddenly reappears outside the farm, naked and in a fugue-like state after encountering a woman in the woods.

In once of the film’s most harrowing scenes, Caleb seems to have some sort of religious epiphany while sweating and convulsing in bed, which triggers the younger siblings to begin cavorting on the floor and shaking uncontrollably. In the midst of all this chaos, William believes Thomasin and her siblings are to blame, and isolates them in the barn, where the family’s black goat may or may not be a talking agent of satan.

Discussing The Witch in depth without spoiling the film’s final turn is fairly difficult, but this is not a film that relies on a twist ending—rather, The Witch is a dark look at one family’s utter physical and spiritual isolation, which causes them to rapidly turn on each other as the supernatural begins to force itself into their lives.

Audiences used to mainstream horror tropes may be perplexed at the tone and pace of the The Witch, which settles into a slow burn early on and essentially remains fairly languid, apart from a few truly harrowing scenes.

Likewise, the final act of the film is likely to be fairly contentious, as it seems so far removed from where one assumes the story is heading. It nearly derails the tightly wound 80-minutes that preceded it with a pair of scenes so on-the-nose that they seem almost laughable, until one considers the story Eggers is telling on the whole. As a title card that closes out the film illustrates, Eggers based much of the film on actual reported cases of witchcraft from the era, down to full lines of dialogue taken from his research, which demonstrates his need to ground the film in historical “reality” as much as possible.

Filled with powerful performances, especially by the four young siblings, The Witch is an unrelentingly bleak horror film whose imagery will stick with you long after you’ve forgotten any quibbles you may have with the film’s final moments.