The Witch

Initially, The Witch seems like a spin-off of Shyamalan’s The Village, but it eventually turns out to be a horror movie that goes beyond genre formulas and doesn’t want to be just another An American Haunting. Remarkable for its use of old British English (that perhaps even Brits themselves do not understand without subtitles), the film attempts to portray the mentality of the characters in a period-authentic way, but these characters’ behavior and responses lead to some solutions that the audience might find unsatisfactory. It is very hard to root for characters who are so fanatic in their religion that they spend more time hysterically praying among themselves and screaming confessions at each other than they do normally conversing. Rather, I wished their fates were finally sealed. Especially because in the second half, the film focuses more on their uncontrollable psychosis than the threat of the witch herself. The film is incoherent in its delivery of the events and their justifications, or you could say that it has a strange (witch-like?) logic. But the atmosphere is dense and the young Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays the only normal character in the film, is a promising newcomer. (06/08/2015)

The Witch feels like a film from another planet, or better said, a media from a completely different time. While it accepts contemporary genre tropes and draws its surface tension from the popular formula of a group of people – a cabin, the surrounding forest, and a supernatural evil, internally it sharply defines what we consider common and therefore actually correct in modern horror. The plot focuses not on the true nature and character of the evil, but on the psyche and behaviour of its victims, which, hand in hand with their religious fanaticism, spreads the already terrifying threat into their own ranks, and the viewer can no longer be sure who is the victim and who is the hunter (as the scene with the dog and the rabbit makes clear). It's true that it's hard to sympathise with such irrational characters, but the painstaking work of evoking the period, the orders of life at the time and the Old English language itself add to the naturalism and authenticity in an overwhelming way, so that we actually feel like we're in another reality, even though we're told at the outset that the story is based on an old folk tale. Though the attempt at added historical value may hurt the expected horror content a bit, the formal side is flawless. Sudden edits matched with the hauntingly unmelodic music cut every scene precisely at its climactic moment, so that its effect cannot be diminished, while the setting is used to great effect thanks to slow camera runs and carefully staged shots, without any image that would feel cheap or predictable. We are not forced to be afraid, as we know in today's "scary" ghost stories, but the fear is omnipresent and insistent. In a nutshell: horror that is different, more honest, and better. 80% (26/03/2016)

(50th KVIFF) As a horror fan I don’t put most of the genre films at the top of the rankings, modern horror doesn’t usually reach the levels of quality, budget and depth to compete with films from other genres. The Witch, however, is really one of the best three films, if not the absolute best film of the 50th Karlovy Vary Film Festival, even if it might not fully correspond to what some drunken viewers were expecting in the midnight section. Such a perfectly directed horror film is something that you only see once in a blue moon. The Witch is not fun, it’s dark, terrifying, and depressing. The amazingly convincing setting of 17th century New England, with the characters and the way they speak, or, rather, what they speak about, and the almost tangible fear of the unknown hidden in the forests, of the witches and the devil’s helper, who threaten the family and drive them into madness. Eggers shows the witches very rarely, but when he does, in short but impressive sequences, it is quite something. Ew! He dedicates more time to the father, the mother, the daughter and the son and shows how the clash with the supernatural has affected their relationships, with insecurity and suspicion creeping among them. The sequence of the agitated father chopping wood in the middle of the night is, thanks to Eggers’s craftsmanship, as terrifying and unpleasant as the one of the witches performing a ritual with a helpless infant. During the scene of Caleb’s cure, I shuddered nervously in my seat and felt a chill running through my spine. Unlike many other horror movies, this one fortunately never stumbles, even in the end, which is very satisfying. After the screening I realised that this is the horror film I’ve always wanted to see even though I didn’t know it. 100 % (08/07/2015)

After the trailer, I was hoping to be delighted by The Witch. In the end, it is only rather inconspicuously, mildly concerning because of the excess of religion and one established witchcraft cult in New England. The movie actually doesn’t contain anything innovative and so there is only one thing which can entice you. And that is the atmosphere. The atmosphere is definitely brutal, but it doesn’t make up the whole movie. Unfortunately. (25/05/2016)

Eggers has a brilliant way of building atmosphere. The Witch is thus an unobtrusively absorbing film that is completely devoid of cheap genre techniques and formalistic devices. Eggers captures the terror and awe on the part of the pilgrims coming from the world of god-fearing civilization to the world of the wilderness in the seventeenth century and facing psychological decay in a hopeless situation. But in addition to that, it makes viewers experience the same feelings. After the disturbingly relieving climax, you suddenly realise that you are totally wound up and that you never want to go to the petting zoo again. The upcoming The Lighthouse focuses on macho hierarchy and shapes its characters in relation to their pasts as something that they want to escape from. In his debut, The Witch, Eggers carefully maps the dynamics within a family that finds itself in a situation of existential distress, where the past conversely becomes both a delightful myth and a burden exacerbating their situation. Furthermore, Eggers brilliantly captures the essence of witchcraft as a bogeyman, a stigma and a form of liberating relief in a society bound by fanatical devotion to belief. (12/11/2021)