Bloody Recruit

Rating: 4/10 (23 April 2016)

I am surprised to read that this has an "awesome look", with details "as exact as it was back then". Being Robert Eggers an art director and costume designer, one of the things that struck me is that the wardrobe looked as if coming directly from a tailor shop or laundry (starch included), that it was not aged as much as needed, and that it looked too clean for working peasants (especially for the father who was the farmer). And to say that things looked "exactly" as they did in the 17th century is a silly sacrilege, a most fitting word for the occasion, when one decides to write a few lines about a motion picture that narrates a folk tale dealing with religion, and loaded with terror elements. I think that if writer-director Eggers had circumscribed his screenplay to folklore with its natural horror edges (a bit in the line of the wonderful 2000 Czech film "Kytice"), "The VVitch" would have been a better movie. There is also a more realistic approach to the tale, within the frame of a psychological drama with supernatural elements (in the line of the fine 1961 production "The Innocents"): superstition and religious belief erodes the basis of an English family that has migrated to North America, and the story slowly builds to tragedy. But Eggers fell into the traps of tired formulas of new American horror films, including omnipresent music, false build-ups of tension through music and sound (as if a tsunami were coming!) that lead to nothing for dramatic purposes, evil represented by a botox-ridden woman with low cleavage, a bit of pedophilia, and silly special effects –the ending is the best example, from the moment the main character takes her bloodstained dress off and sits at the family table, to the gratuitous final witch dance and ascent. In the end it seems a bloody, stupid way to recruit a new witch: was that entire massacre necessary to add a new girl to the coven? Let's hope that next time Robert Eggers decides to make things simpler, asks someone else to write the script, and a composer that knows when to stop, for Eggers shows a good hand for directing actors, and a good eye for composition and framing.