The Witch

The horror genre is one that rarely captures real slices of life. Yes, they can be based on true stories, such as The Conjuring, but those films only relate to specific incidents. What if you could make a horror movie that represented an actual fear and paranoia that people had for hundreds of years? That would be pretty scary. It's also been achieved by first time director Robert Eggers with The Witch.

After being banished from a New England plantation, William (Ralph Ineson) and his family set out to find land on which they can live. They find a nice plot on the edge of a dark forest, because that's not at all foreboding and terrifying for your young children. Whilst playing with her baby brother, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) manages to lose him, despite the fact that he was right in front of her. Soon other strange goings-on result in her mother Katherine (Kate Dickie) accusing Thomasin of being a witch.

I think we have come to expect horror movies to follow a certain pattern, so when they deviate from that we are surprised by our uncertainty and makes the movie that much more scary. Such is the case with The Witch. It's definitely unlike any horror movie you've seen, mainly because it's not that scary. It is however incredibly unsettling and taps into a primal level of paranoia that exists in everyone. Well, that is the case up until the last scene of the movie. See, what happens throughout is that you start to get an unnerving feeling that Thomasin might indeed be the witch because she is the only one present when any of the witchy things happen and it even gets to the point where she doubts that she herself may actually be a witch and she just doesn't know it. It also doesn't help that the religious fervour stirred up by the family adds to her doubt. But it's super disappointing when you're going to throw away all that tension and paranoia that you've spent a whole movie building up away to say, "Hey guess what? There was actually a coven of witches hanging out in the woods the whole time." This is an M. Night Shymalan level twist that this movie really really didn't need. A cut before this and only then I would have been satisfied.

Ralph Ineson probably gives the most dedicated performance in this whole cast. His devotion to speaking old English is incredible and I could absolutely see him existing in a vacuum where he is actually from the 17th century. This use of language only makes his character's religious devotion more believable. Anya Taylor-Joy did an okay job at playing Thomasin, but I did feel like her character was slightly lacking and there was definitely more to be explored between her and her brother Caleb, played by Harvey Scrimshaw. Kate Dickie was amazing as the personification of hysteria. We only briefly see the human incarnation of Black Philip, but I found Wahab Chaudhry's performance was incredibly unsettling, but then again the goat who played him for the majority made some very interesting choices.

For me, The Witch was heading to be a solid 4 star film. It gave me the right amount of chills that told me I was in for a nightmare filled sleep. However, the film went on for two seconds too long and I lost all interest in what I had just spent the previous hour and a half watching.