Wednesday Review: The Witch

Before I went into The Witch, conveniently enough, I was thinking of MovieBob's video on Ghostbusters, as well as the upcoming sequel to The Conjuring. While I wasn't there for the Reagan years, Bob tell us that it was a time of Conservative backlash, in which films like The Exorcist and The Omen warned us of the dangers of losing touch with our old traditions. Bob went on to argue that Ghostbusters was a counter-backlash, in which science and religion clash, and religion gets its ass kicked. Before the movie started I was contemplating how this battle was starting up again, with the stories of Ed and Lorraine Warren opening up opposite a reboot of Ghostbusters.

Then The Witch started, and I found myself viewing a film that better captured the zeitgeist of our age than either of those films are likely to. This is a film that presents us with religious fanatics, but asks us to neither hate them nor put them on a pedestal. Instead, the film asks us to pity them, as we see their own fanaticism destroy them.

To me, at least, this captures the spirit of the last decade or so. The religious fanatics circle the wagon, not to stave off the forces of secularism, but the force of doubt. If there is a new idea emerging from the youth of this age it's simply that certainty in any belief or ideal can be catastrophic, while no one has ever shed blood in the name of doubt. There's no way science or magic can save you, but evil can't knock down a tower of belief if the tower is flexible. So, evil would logically attempt it's assault on those of us who have the most rigid and fragile views of the world. Anyone who grew up in a deeply religious home can tell you just how vulnerable such a state of religious surrender can be.

To talk about the actual movie, it opens with a Puritan man and his family being banished from an early American colony over his own unorthodox religious views. While we're not given the specifics, it's made pretty clear that this is a man too fundamentalist for the Puritans. I suspect the scene at the colony may have been included to reassure us that this film would not have the same ending as The Village.

Some time after their move, the family suffers a blight on their crops, and their infant son disappears suddenly. This is only the beginning of a string of tragedies that I won't dare to spoil. Eventually, the family comes to believe that they are under attack by a Witch. We're shown fairly early that they're correct, but it's their actions that ultimately doom them, more than any external threat could.

I admire this movie for showing the family, at least initially, as very loving. It would have been easy to show the father as either a cold, brutal man, or affably evil. Instead, we're shown a man who clearly loves his family deeply, and is determined to provide for them, both physically and spiritually. However, he's confronted with the harsh truth that he simply doesn't know what can save his family. The tone varies between comedy and horror, with the father approaching Wile E. Coyote levels of zealotry as he doubles his efforts while forgetting his aim.

The rest of the family are a collection of time bombs. Every one of them is so utterly repressed in their emotions, and so isolated, that the slightest temptation could send them off their path and into Hell. As with the father, there's literally nothing any of them could do that would make you feel anything but sorry for them.

I liked a lot of the creative choices as well. The movie mostly avoided jump scares. It often teased them, and then backed away at the very brink, leaving the audience uncomfortable. It also gave the entire family accents so difficult to understand that we only got the general gist of what they were saying, which helped to create a feeling that we were looking in on a different society if not an entirely different world. We understood these people in the broadest of terms, which paradoxically deepens our connection to them.

The ending is absolutely brilliant, and reinforces my entire understanding. The easiest victims for the devil are his most fanatical enemies. Evil preys on those who are completely unable to adapt or deal in shades of gray. I've heard so many fanatics say that either the entire Bible is true, or not a word of it is. By their own admission any error in their sacred text would destroy their faith, and with it their entire basis for morality.

It's probably obvious that my experiences influenced my viewing of this movie. It's hard to say how people with other experiences might interpret the film differently. I can only tell you that it's a wonderfully acted film that will leave you shivering. This is the best horror film I've seen since It Follows. I hope to see more like this in the future. If you haven't seen it, check it out.