Film Review

The Witch Review

Published

10 years ago

March 22, 2016

Admin

Casting A New Spell

♦ Tripwire gave editor-in-chief Joel Meadows dressed in his finest Puritan hat and boots the task of reviewing Robert Eggers’ unsettling psychological 17th century horror The Witch

The Witch

Director: Robert Eggers

Stars: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie

Horror films in recent years have become boring, predictable and formulaic. The success of Eli Roth’s line in torture porn has seemingly meant that an endless parade of weak photocopies have been trotted out on a regular basis by film companies. So it is to Robert Eggers’ credit that he turned to something more primeval and more terrifying in his directorial feature debut. Eggers has been working as a production designer up to this point and he displays a visual flourish here that really adds to the mounting sense of despair and horror. The Witch is set in New England in the 1630s and deals with a Puritan family who seem besieged by witchcraft and devilry. Shot in Canada with an almost exclusively English cast, The Witch feels very much like an old-school 1970s horror film like Witchfinder General or The Wicker Man. There is a genuine sense of something unsettling going on here, helped by the stripped-back visual palette that Eggers and his cinematographer Jarin Blaschke employ to tell the story. The painterly approach to the look of The Witch is one of the ways it marks itself out and creates its unique ambience. There is a mundanity here to the story which also helps to build the drama and the psychological horror. The cast are very good too especially Anya Taylor-Joy as Thomasin and Dickie and Ireson are also very impressive too. Eggers has created on a small budget ($3.5m) to achieve more than films with ten or twenty times that amount manage. Eggers really understands how to subvert horror with a simple yet thought-provoking tale of evil, utilising the 17th century setting and the Canadian locations where it was shot to visceral effect. Because he didn’t have a big budget (apparently it was shot in only 25 days), he had to be more imaginative and this really manifests itself.

There are films that you watch when you know that you are seeing the emergence of a rare talent. It happened with Tarantino on Reservoir Dogs, you saw it with Del Toro’s Cronos and The Witch can be added to that list of impressive debuts.

The mark of a great horror film is that it stays with you after you leave the cinema and the visual flair on display here combined with some memorable horror creations means that The Witch will remain in the back of your mind long after you see it. You’ll never look at a black goat in quite the same way again.