Crafting the witching

Rating: Null/10 (26 May 2016)

There are two movies at work here (see also the title). One is about placing us in a remote place and time, New England in the 1600s when it was uncharted wilderness, giving us a presence in a life outside maps. A family has been ostracized and comes to live in a remote farm at the edge of the woods. Dread here comes from knowing we are on an edge of the world and no one will be coming for help.
And then we have another kind of presence as you might guess, lurking in the woods and circling from afar. The apparitions are scarce, which seems to have put some viewers off, but are harrowing when they came so we stay the duration until the next one. The first one in particular is so well timed and ghastly; we know right away this will be a world without mercy, without cuteness about evil.
They made it overall, this is worth watching, it creeps. The difference is all in the first kind of presence that ushers us in a world of human frailty. There are all kinds of ways to explore that edge, only one of which is the notion that evil is being hallucinated, reality cursed by belief in a narrative about evil powers. The forest as playground for chance havoc transformed in the traumatized mind. The filmmakers toy with as much in the scene with the kids becoming possessed by the sight of possession, then snapping out of it. And it's of course in Thomasin giving herself over to delicious madness, levitating out of mind that witnessed what it did.
I would have liked to see a Herzog version, even more knowingly centered in shedding knowledge to give us mind levitation, from his days when he was still a shaman of the craft of seeing. Or this with a lusher camera that listens for the night. We don't altogether escape movie- ism here and this kind of film more than others needs to reach me primal, although it must be an uphill struggle. Was Blairwitch the last time our viewer defenses could be witched away?