The Witch

Unique. It's as if the cameraman had been transported back several centuries in a time machine and filmed the feelings of a family in isolation in the middle of the dark woods. Everything is subordinated to these feelings of the time – the archaic language, the great piety that permeated every individual back then, the fear of the unknown, the fear even of the forest next to you, where evil, evil spirits and witches were believed to reside. Because faith in Christ and fear of the powers of hell was everything at that time, the whole film is permeated with pious talk, prayers and irrational behaviour, which – as it seems from the reviews here – the dull-witted population, without knowledge of the historical context and dumbed down by the mainstream, will not appreciate. The rest of us give it a thumbs up, because such period parables, where the author drew from written sources of the time, bringing to life the witch trials and the mindset of pious people, are a rarity in today's cinemas. It's just a shame about the overly suggestive ending, if the author had had the balls to drive it through the simple "psychosis" of one frightened family, I would applaud even more. And Anna Taylor-Joy? You’ll be hearing a lot about her, trust me! (30/07/2016)

These a few dozens of seconds were completely unnecessary, without them it could have been the best horror of recent years. But we cannot do anything about it and their presence is even a bigger letdown because the problem is not what they show but how. Anyway, otherwise it is pretty good. You can find here everything what a real old school horror movie should contain; disturbing atmosphere, graduating psycho tension within a closed community (in this case a family in the middle of the woods), exposing carefully written characters, fears, evil and prejudices hidden in us, disturbing scenes... I am completely happy about that; especially when you add the impressive camera à la Dutch masters and acting performances of the whole family, which are worth highlighting, including the children. I can't remember when four children played such a complicated characters so well. Perhaps Eggers will make more horror movies, because a similar approach to this genre has been missing in recent years. (12/07/2015)

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)

The Witch is a return to the foundations of the genre, whose cinematic form crystallized in the 1930s, thus a return to careful work with atmosphere. We can observe a gradual uncertainty and loss of support shaping the spiritual and physical world of immigrants to the New World in the 17th century. Suffering leads to the breakdown of the family, which we tend to consider as the basic building block of society. At that time, the community was most important. Outside of it, there was only struggling and in the long run, zero chance of survival in the wilderness. The key to the film is the opening scene of excommunication from the church and the community, the cruelest possible punishment, harsher than the death penalty. What follows is a logical descent into darkness and ruin. Just as shamanic magical rituals are a reality for tribal natural cultures, witches are a reality for people shaped by beliefs and early modern religion. The clash of devoutness, the depth of which secularized Europeans cannot imagine tainted by science and modern technology, with freethinking and hedonism of sinners, is precisely what makes the film so impressive. The Witch is not a flashy and expensive film, but it is meticulously shot with knowledge of the subject and awareness of what the filmmaker wants to achieve, and last but not least, it is characterized by a refined sense of detail. Some of the popcorn-eating viewers may feel deprived of some jumpscares, but for me, the film is an exemplary example of what a horror film should be, and if Eggers had refrained from a too unambiguous interpretation of events at the end, the film could have received a perfect score. Overall impression: 85%. (31/12/2021)

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)