Robert Eggers
The Witch

It was supposed to be the summer of It Follows, in terms of horror cinema, but once you've seen The Witch, there are few doubts: between the two, the great film is definitely the latter. Robert Eggers, making his feature film debut, constructs a very intelligent and thoughtful work. He draws horror from tradition, religion, and popular esotericism; this way, there is a strong feeling that the threat is unstoppable and hence the pain inevitable. There are no physical confrontations between the protagonists and evil forces; the clash is primarily psychological, based on people's desires and fears. In this sense, Eggers' vision is brilliant: the witch manifests as a signal or suggestion, like a rabbit or something else; it is then the weak or deviant minds of people that build the horror around themselves, until they are driven to extremes, until they subconsciously embrace the demonic forces, which take on the appearance of their desires.

The dynamics that develop within the family after the disappearance of the newborn Samuel work really well in showing the unfolding of horror and paranoia. The forces of the devil rarely manifest, the horror is built entirely on uncertainty, on the fear that something might happen, on the doubt that Thomasin might be a witch, or that the twins Mercy and Jonas are servants of Satan. A spiraling of suspicion leads people to distrust everyone. This is the essence of more mature horror cinema, the kind that builds fear on what's unsaid and unseen.

Visually, Eggers almost works a miracle, with a budget of 3 million. The truly horrific scenes are very few, but those few seconds reverberate throughout the entire film, placing a thorn in the side of the viewer who then finds themselves in a similar psychological state as the protagonists: they fear a threat that almost never materializes. And so every moment could be the right one for the arrival of the witch, but the waiting is equally agonizing, if not more so.

The conceptual handling of the witch and Satan seems to me fundamentally correct and coherent. The ability to abduct only the unbaptized, the need to lay baits to lure people in and then feed on them, the different fates of those who resist the witch’s temptations, up to a character’s final choice that completes the cycle of evil. The concepts have their solidity.

The Witch is strong also because it digs deep into ancient fears. Religion is one of the key topics and continuously returns in dialogues; the implicit and constant battle is between God and the Devil, in which the protagonists are merely insignificant cogs. Their fate is now at a cruel crossroads: live in terror or be taken by Satan. It truly feels like reliving the darkest European Middle Ages, despite being set in early 1600s America.

Aesthetically speaking, we are at decidedly high levels. There is a minute at the beginning when the witch appears that is among the most powerful and disturbing of the year, at least. The implicit terror of the forest is rendered excellently, as is the connoted use of landscapes, darkness, rain, noise, and music. All of this without ever overdoing it. Every moment has its own tools to instill fear, there’s no need to pile on. The candlelight dinner is gorgeous, as are some musical and noise passages. Perhaps a masterpiece is the sequence in which one of the protagonists, bewitched by the witch, has seizures, rants, and ends up speaking with God. The writing is highly effective, and the viewer panics because they expect some kind of blood explosion.

Eggers masterfully plays with the audience's expectations, and if you will, it mocks all those films that, unable to narrate horror, think they can show it with makeup and special effects. But the greatest fear is given in absentia, it is the not knowing, the not seeing. Consistently, Satan can only be a voice in the shadows. Or, it refers to symbolism and parallels never too emphasized (the goat Black Phillip, the father as a Christ-like figure).

Better could have been done on just a couple of purely visual choices at the end, which do not hold up to the blood sequence of the first few minutes. And perhaps explain more precisely the fate and nature of the twins. But it is also true that leaving some questions unexplained is in perfect harmony with Eggers' poetics.

8/10