Join the esbat

Rating: 7/10 (22 August 2016)

It was not until I had finished this movie that I remembered the tiny village of Las Paules in the Spanish Pyrenees where I had lived a few years ago. There, in the year 1593, twenty eight women were accused of and hung for witchcraft, almost exactly a hundred years before the infamous Salem Witch Trials. I would have judged The Witch to be a solid, rather unusual and very slow horror flick, but because of this personal" connection to the theme of the film I decided to spent some more time thinking about it in greater detail.
First of all, I think The Witch is a very well produced movie. According to IMDb, director Robert Eggers most often works as a Production Designer and a Costume Designer, and it shows in the dedication to detail. Here and there, that attention to apparel was almost a bit overdone, which would have turned the movie into a hipster thing, but ultimately, it was well balanced and congruent to the story. Everything has a strong feeling of craftsmanship. The acting is down to earth, accents are thick, the sets look as if a group of Amish had just finished them. In my book, this evokes a pretty neat impression of seventeenth century New England. Which helps in diving into the story.
A father of four is banished from a puritan plantation because of quarrels with the local church. He decides to take his family into the wilderness that lies beyond the high palisades of the plantation village, to find a place where they can live according to their own set of beliefs. Unfortunately, everything goes haywire.
Eggers decides to give us one of the most gruesome moments of the film – the kidnapping, murder and processing" of the youngest child – right in the beginning. Then he cuts back to the everyday life of the family on their secluded parcel. This is odd, but interesting. What will be problematic for some is that from this point on, the movie has the pace of a slow art house film. Not much scary stuff is happening. The treeline next to the family's home and the dense forest are used in a very effective visual manner to create an atmosphere of general creepiness. Other than that, the only scary attempts come from some off screen rustling of leaves and branches, which seems to indicate that the family is stalked by something. This is repeated several times and felt like a rather cheap scare to me.
There are hints at some sexual tensions between the family members, with some of them entering puberty or adulthood. Those surging feelings are obviously conflicting with the puritan mindset of the head of the family. Issues of poverty and morale are introduced, as the father needs to sell his wife's heirloom for some corn. As he doesn't disclose his actions even when the wife suspects their daughter of theft, questions of honesty and loyalty are thrown in. Tensions rise from scene to scene. At this point, the movie seems more like a study of the problems and constraints that puritan settlers were facing while trying to domesticate the wilderness around them.
When Caleb, the oldest son, get's lost in the woods and stumbles on the doorstep of the very witch that kidnapped his baby brother, things start to completely disintegrate for the family. While accusing each other of making deals with Satan, William the father makes some desperate yet destitute attempts to restore order and keep his remaining family alive. He ultimately fails due to the fact that he is facing Satan himself, who has been infiltrating their lives in the form of a black goat.
As the dust settles, the only person alive is Thomasin, the eldest daughter. In a unfathomable moment, she decides to give herself to Satan and to join the wild esbat in the depths of the forest. This depiction of witchcraft as something evil will probably not make this film very popular amongst certain women's groups, since the perception of what a witch is or was has dramatically changed in the last century. Robert Eggers obviously did not try to be politically correct, instead he created a visual representation of the superstitions and nightmares of our ancestors, and with this, he succeeded.