New England, 17th century. Because of his own interpretation of the Bible, William is banished from a settlement due to heresy. His entire family—wife Katherine, daughter Thomasin, son Caleb, and twins Mercy and Jonas—follows him into the forest, where they live in a shack. Their new baby suddenly disappears, and they presume it was taken by the wolves. In order to scare her sister, Thomasin says that she is a witch who took away the baby. The family is suffering from hunger since the harvest was weak. When Thomasin goes with Caleb into the forest to check a trap, their horse goes wild. Caleb gets lost in the woods and meets a mysterious woman. Caleb is later found naked, and brought back to the shack, where he hallucinates and dies. William and Katherine blame Thomasin and think she is a witch. The black goat attacks and kills William. Katherine blames Thomasin and attacks her. Thomasin kills her mother with a knife in self-defence. All alone, Thomasin hears voices and gathers at a fire with witches, who start levitating.
Robert Eggers' feature length debut film is a bizarre psychological essay on how the dark times of depravity and scarcity make people susceptible to conspiracy theories and paranoid delusion, in order to try to find some sort of flimsy explanation for all the bad luck around them, yet this mostly just ends in the blame falling on a scapegoat, in this case the teenage daughter and protagonist Thomasin (very good Anya Taylor-Joy). "The Witch" is raw, astringent and a difficult film, not for everyone's taste, and never makes it easy for the viewers to "get into it". The setting is eerily placed on an isolated outcast farm near the forest, from which dangers can pop out anytime, yet the characters are strangely cold and distant, never managing for the viewers to root for them when things go wrong. "The Witch" is not interested in banal scares or shocks, but in disturbing mood which makes the entire film seem unpleasant. Somewhere in the middle of the film, there is a really disturbing sequence in which the boy, Caleb, is lying sick in bed and hallucinating, even throwing up blood, which will be difficult for some viewers to sit through. "The Witch" touches upon the themes of religious dogma and its scary enforcement, yet its ending is deliberately vague, again using the notion that it all could have been either real or just a form of delusion. It is a good dark film on its own right, yet it lacks more ingenuity, versatility or more colorful execution in this grey storyline.
Grade:++
No comments:
Post a Comment