The best horror films are intimate and immersive, making you feel like you're inside someone else's nightmare.
"The Witch" is what writer-director Robert Eggers calls "a nightmare from the past" and "a New England folktale." A New Hampshire native, Eggers conjured up the story from memories of the "crumbling colonial farmhouses, hidden graveyards in the woods and the world of witches" that surrounded his childhood home. Infused with a rich sense of personal and cultural history, the film transports you to a painfully real point in the past dripping with dread.
Set in New England circa 1630, the film follows a devout farmer who's forced to move his family away from a colonial plantation after their church threatens to banish them. William (Ralph Ineson) relocates his wife, Katherine (Kate Dickie), and their five children to a farm on the edge of a serene yet sinister forest.
The family's life turns upside down when the newborn vanishes and his brother Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) becomes possessed by an evil spirit. Katherine starts to lose her faith, but William's belief in otherworldly forces grows stronger, leading him to suspect his teenage daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) of witchcraft.
Although the film takes places decades before the infamous Salem witch trials, they loom over the story like an omen. Fraught with tension, the family's confrontations with Thomasin play out as a crystal ball image of the scare that spread across Salem and took several lives with it. "The Witch" ultimately illustrates what the trials also revealed — the unsettling reality that religious convictions can hold people captive.
The claustrophobic feel of the film is a large credit to the performances. The three leads give off the sense that their characters are all suffocating from something. For Ineson's character, William, that suffocation is a result of his responsibility to protect his loved ones (even as he fears what preys upon them). Ineson's deep, gravelly voice provides a powerful contrast to his character's vulnerability.
Dickie paints a quietly devastating portrait of a mother imprisoned by grief. (One of the film's most haunting images is that of a crow pecking on her chest while she imagines feeding her missing baby.)
The real star of the film, however, is Taylor-Joy. At once innocent and incendiary, she embodies the moral ambiguity at the dark heart of the story.
The setting is an equally important character. Dark clouds linger over the New England countryside, and a blanket of mist covers the family's farmhouse. It's a moody, otherworldly atmosphere, making you feel as though you're seeing through the dreamlike fog of the family's memories. The world of the film is essentially the one that was embedded in Eggers' subconscious when he was a child.
"Growing up, we always had stories of the witch in the woods or the witch down the block. I tried to go to Salem every Halloween and I was always disappointed that the witches weren't real," Eggers said in a Q&A at the New Hampshire Film Festival.
"The Witch" is Eggers' first feature film — a dazzling debut. (He won Best Director at the Sundance Film Festival last year.) Executed with extreme confidence and attention to detail, it feels like a passion project.
"I tried to make a lot of films, and no one wanted to make them. They were too weird, too obscure," Eggers said. "I thought, 'I have to make a genre film that's personal to me. If I'm going to make a genre film, it has to be personal and it has to be good.'”
"The Witch" is personal, powerful and the first great film of the year.