Convincing tale of Puritan family's paranoia leading to murder ruined by reliance on typical horror film tropes

Rating: 4/10 (22 February 2017)

The Witch marks the directorial debut of Roger Eggers, who meticulously researched this tale of a 17th century Puritan family banished from their community due to a disagreement over the interpretation of the New Testament. The characters and dialogue are based on actual court transcripts from the time period as well as folk tales that reflect the supernatural beliefs of the people of that era.
The attention to period detail is perhaps the film's greatest strength as well as its greatest weakness. Eggers' protagonists--consisting of parents William and wife Katherine, son Caleb, and fraternal twins Mercy and Jonas, as well as their daughter, Thomasin (who emerges as the story's antagonist)--feel as though they were delivered directly to the screen via a time machine. The verisimilitude of the characters is that convincing. At the same time, because they speak in the arcane style of old English, dependent on the Bible, you might find it quite difficult understanding the words that are being uttered—unless English subtitles are available on your DVD.
The story begins with the family living in a remote, rural area. Thomasin is babysitting Katherine's newborn son, Samuel, who is kidnapped—and we soon learn that a witch snatched Samuel and killed him for his blood (to make a flying ointment). When William takes Caleb hunting, he confesses that he sold Katherine's silver cup for hunting supplies. Later, when Katherine questions Thomasin about the disappearance of the cup, she implies that not only did she steal the cup but also had something to do with Samuel's disappearance. Meanwhile, the other children claim that the family goat, Black Phillip, has been talking to them.
When Caleb decides to go hunting in the forest by himself, Thomasin insists on joining him. Eventually William finds Thomasin but Caleb ends up in the clutches of a witch and when he finally returns to the home, he's dying of a fatal illness. After the young boy's death, the twins and Thomasin accuse one another of being in league with witches and William is forced to lock them all up in the goat's stable.
What could have been a nice little story of a 17th century family's paranoia leading to murder, is replaced by a silly folktale about witches being responsible for the carnage that unfolds before us. The sequence of events is as follows: the twins disappear, William finds Thomasin unconscious in the stable with blood on her hands, Black Phillip kills William, Katherine blames Thomasin for William's death and attempts to strangle her, and Thomasin kills her mother in self-defense.
Eggers appears to buy the superstitious mumble-jumble of those times when he has Thomasin end up in the forest talking to Black Phillip the goat, who of course is actually Satan. When she signs Satan's "big book," it's the old trope of signing away one's soul to the devil.
Alan Scherstuhl, writing in the Village Voice, couldn't have said it better: "The Witch purports, at times, to confront ignorance and hysteria, but in the end, for horror thrills, Eggers's film sides with the preachers and executioners." In other words, despite all the impressive research, The Witch is just another dumb horror movie. Despite the earnest performances (especially an intense Anya Taylor-Joy playing the accused Thomasin), once we're force fed all this nonsense about witches and a goat morphing into Satan, all bets are unfortunately off.