The Witch

The great out­doors and the com­po­si­tion of human faces are both wrought with crisp def­i­n­i­tion in Robert Eggers’ sump­tu­ous debut, The Witch, which is being mis-sold as a hor­ror film. God-fear­ing fam­i­lies, 17^th cen­tu­ry lifestyles, folk­loric mys­tery and haunt­ing­ly grotesque tableaux are the ingre­di­ents with which Eggers plays.

They are part of the iconog­ra­phy of hor­ror, and the images scour them­selves onto your brain thanks to their dis­turb­ing bril­liance. But, sim­ply put, there are no scares in this movie. Char­ac­ters in hor­ror films usu­al­ly begin care­free and are grad­u­al­ly ambushed by fear. In The Witch fear defines the char­ac­ters from the first frame, so there is no esca­lat­ing ten­sion or increased stakes. This is a dark mood piece that is made out­stand­ing by rig­or­ous recre­ation of peri­od dia­logue, eerie set­tings and cap­ti­vat­ing performances.

William (Ralph Ine­son) caus­es his fam­i­ly to be exiled from their New Eng­land com­mu­ni­ty as pun­ish­ment for his way­ward reli­gious preach­ing. Ineson’s voice is so low and rum­bling that he sounds like an angry god, and even has a lit­tle of a Jesus‑y look: long tawny brown hair and a noble mous­tache, albeit a sharp­er nose and more sunken fea­tures than Our Lord and Sav­iour. He is set up as an impos­ing patri­arch only for his pow­er to swift­ly leak away and the space filled to capac­i­ty with super­nat­ur­al confusion.

As soon as his fam­i­ly sets up camp in a chilly for­est glade, their new­born baby dis­ap­pears. William’s wife, Kather­ine (Kate Dick­ie), is wracked with grief. Dickie’s face is the crag­gy match for her husband’s, where­as their chil­dren are milky of face and rosy of cheek. The eldest, Thomasin (Anya Tay­lor-Joy) is on the cusp of wom­an­hood. The begin­nings of a bust blos­som under her pious dress, ten­drils of white-blonde hair which hang loose from her head scarf.

She is clos­est in age to Caleb (the fab­u­lous­ly named Har­vey Scrimshaw). Freck­les blaze across his per­fect skin. Despite his youth, he has the heavy bur­dens of an adult male on his small shoul­ders. The iso­lat­ed set­ting and duties of liv­ing off the land mean that there is no time for lark­ing, although the mis­chief-lov­ing, gap-toothed twins Mer­cy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Daw­son) find a way to run amok with the family’s goat, Black Phillip.

While there is an exter­nal ​‘evil’ made explic­it ear­ly on, The Witch is pri­mar­i­ly a por­trait of a fam­i­ly destroy­ing itself from with­in. It doesn’t take much – the mer­est casu­al sug­ges­tion – for the adults to begin shriek­ing puri­tan­i­cal con­dem­na­tion at their off­spring. Accus­ing a sib­ling of being a witch ini­tial­ly seems like 17^th cen­tu­ry domes­tic ban­ter (“Are you witch­es?”, ​“Does father think I am?”, ​“Are you?!”) but parental reac­tions are so dead­ly seri­ous that any humour per­ceived by an audi­ence is apart from a sto­ry peo­pled by fam­i­ly mem­bers too scared of life to be able to love one another.

The pre­cise, old-world dia­logue lends an air of for­mal­i­ty, which suits a set­ting that resem­bles a Grimm fairy tale. The colour palette is spe­cif­ic and rich: for­est green, bleached corn yel­low, the brown and cream uni­form that all char­ac­ters wear. When blood tar­nish­es these hues, it’s a state­ment as informed by images as it is ideas.