Two stars. Rated R, for disturbing violent content and graphic nudity
By Derrick Bang
Filmmaker Robert Eggers’ modest
little chiller is being hailed as 2016’s first “New Wave horror masterpiece,”
akin to last year’s It Follows.
Sadly, that’s high praise this film
doesn’t deserve.
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| As Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) continues to suffer the guilt of having "lost" her baby brother, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) tries to comfort her. But he does the job badly, in part because of his own conflicted feelings about his older sister. |
It also has been described as the
unholy love child of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and The Blair Witch Project. That’s much closer to the truth, albeit
with far more Bergman than Blair.
Unlike that 1999 cinematic con job, which was a case of the emperor having no
clothes whatsoever, The Witch does
deliver a few lurid sequences while building to its nasty finale.
But Eggers is a much better
director than writer. He definitely gets full marks for moody atmosphere and
unsettling tension, and — assisted by production designer Craig Lathrop — quite
cleverly stretches the $1 million budget to deliver impressive period
authenticity.
But the plot is clumsy and
random, with key details and motivation left undisclosed, and the characters are
badly under-written. We’ve no idea why any of this is happening, or what these
poor folks have done to deserve it (although there’s a suggestion that female
puberty is the catch-all culprit).
More to the point, character
behavior is deranged, and therefore impossible to take seriously. Much has been
made of Eggers’ meticulous adherence to early 17th century New England dress,
mannerisms and particularly speech; that’s well and good, but he rather
overplays the religious zealotry, to the point of generating unintended
laughter at all the wrong moments.
On top of which, even with the
aforementioned third-act climax, Eggers’ pacing is languid to the point of
tedium. Something obviously is wrong, when you can’t sustain interest for a
brief 90 minutes.
In a word, The Witch is a yawn. Until the final 10 minutes or so.
The year is 1630, and Eggers
opens his film during a tribunal taking place within a small New England
colonial settlement. William (Ralph Ineson) and his family have been charged
with something unspecified; it appears to be some sort of religious
disagreement. Under threat of banishment by the church, William haughtily
agrees to leave the Puritan settlement, relocating his wife and five children
to a remote plot of land at the edge of an ominous forest.
A bit of time passes; we rejoin
William and his clan after they have erected a home of wood, stone and thatch,
and planted a crop of corn. Elder daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) helps her
mother, Katherine (Kate Dickie), watch the younger children: bratty twins Mercy
(Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson), and their infant brother. Eldest son
Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), only slightly younger than Thomasin, spends his time
helping their father.
On an otherwise ordinary day,
Thomasin takes a morning stroll with the infant; they pause for a moment, and
the girl plays peek-a-boo with her baby brother, much to the latter’s giggling
delight. But then, during one split-second interval when Thomasin covers and
then opens her eyes ... the baby is gone. Utterly vanished.
But not from our view. What happens next to this poor innocent babe is ghastly
beyond description: thankfully, conveyed only by the briefest of tightly edited
glimpses.
William and his family know none
of this. Thomasin is horrified and chagrined, and can’t help feeling guilty;
how could it have happened so quickly? But Katherine takes this loss much
harder, and — again, for no discernable reason — blames her eldest daughter.
Far more maliciously than seems reasonable.
Things subsequently take an
unpleasant, Job-like turn. The crop fails; carefully placed animal traps get
sprung, but remain empty; the family goats give blood, rather than milk. Mercy
and Jonas become conspiratorial in the presence of the small herd’s lone black
goat, dubbed Black Phillip; we get the impression that it’s talking to them,
much the way Regan MacNeil so casually chatted with “Captain Howdy” during the
early stages of The Exorcist.
Or maybe it’s just Mercy and
Jonas being obnoxious, in order to taunt and annoy Thomasin.
Except that we already know
that’s unlikely. Early reviews have praised Eggers for the “ambiguity” of his
script — is there a witch, or not? — but that’s rubbish; we’ve seen what the deep-woods witch has done
to the baby, and why.
The family’s ill fortune and
downward spiral intensify, in the manner of standard “cabin in the woods”
fright flicks; increased suspicion falls upon poor Thomasin. And then ...
Ah, yes. And then.
Eggers builds to a conclusion
that may satisfy horror movie cliché, but it’s far from acceptable in terms of
plot structure and character continuity.
I suppose The Witch can be viewed as a cautionary tale about the dangers of
religious mania; it’s also possible to argue that William has brought this
nasty calamity upon his family because of his unspecified hubris — referencing
their initial banishment — or because, his God-fearing fealty notwithstanding,
he tells minor lies when it suits his purposes.
Or maybe it’s because Caleb’s
gaze lingers, one morning, on the only so slightly
exposed swell of the sleeping Thomasin’s breast.
Whatever. If that’s all it takes
to induce God’s wrath and fall under Satan’s spell, the Puritans never would
have survived their first winter. Point being, this is one of those stories
where evil is so all-powerful, that good never stands a chance ... and when the
scales are that unbalanced, it’s hard to get emotionally involved.
These folks are doomed, end of
story.
That said, Taylor-Joy is a
compelling young actress, and she certainly holds our attention. Her Thomasin
is dutiful and honorable, desperately loyal to her family — particularly to her
father, and to Caleb — even as events conspire to render her an outcast. One
climactic confrontation with William is painful for its intensity, the latter
torn between suspicion and parental love.
Ineson is equally fine as the
imperious William, who nonetheless is capable of gentleness. Even at William’s
calmer moments, though, Ineson’s eyes convey a glimpse of the spiritual madness
that we recognize from the likes of Jim Jones or David Koresh.
Scrimshaw also is memorable as
the quiet Caleb, whose own budding maturity leads him to question some of his
father’s blindly obedient religious fervor.
We never get a bead on Dickie’s
Katherine; her behavior is too haphazard. Nor are young Grainger and Dawson
persuasive as the insufferable twins, except when they don’t talk. Their silent terror, late in these events, is
reasonably convincing; their overly earnest dialog, in great contrast, is
contrived, badly delivered and unintentionally laughable.
Eggers also tries to generate
horror from lingering close-ups on the aforementioned black goat — and a rabbit
that begins to hang around the farm — with uneven results. If you wholly
swallow this film’s disquieting mood, these creatures might seem menacing. If
not ... said close-ups are merely silly.
Actually, Eggers’ tendency to
hold on static images, and to bridge scenes with long moments of screen blackness, becomes quite tiresome. Mark
Korven’s so-called soundtrack — little more than cacophonous noises and choral
shrieks (supposedly suggested by 17th century psalm settings) — is shrill and
obnoxious.
Eggers definitely has directorial
chops, and in some ways has done a lot with very little. I’d love to see such
talent attached to a better constructed script. Meanwhile, this feature debut
leaves us with little more than an eye-rolling shrug.
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