The Witch (2015, dir. Robert Eggers)

Reflections from a Young Movie-goer

   The jump-scare is perhaps one of the worst afflictions of cinematic horror today. Countless films recently have forgone the often emotionally-complex slow burn of atmosphere building to instead churn out a series of uniformly dull, predictable shocks with no inherent reward, value or insight to them. The need to make a quick buck drives this trend; jump-scares are easy, cheap and, to a lot of people, enough for the price of admission. This is problematic for horror as it doesn't give the producers any incentive to risk making more complex, thought-provoking pictures, on account of the fear that they won't perform at the box-office. However, this is a vicious circle as the average cinema-goer has been conditioned to expect cheap, superficial thrills from horror. When they are confronted with a film that doesn't seem to provide these, they won't bother with it. This means that when indie films like The Witch (2015), devoid of jump-scares and full of ideas, get mainstream attention, its something to be quite excited about.

Robert Eggers' directorial debut, describing itself as "A New England Folktale", centres on a family of Puritans in colonial New England who are expelled from their plantation over what seems to be differences in religious belief. The family moves to the edge of a forest, where they build a new home and a farm to live on. Frequent, lingering shots of the vast landscape and forest, almost completely absent of human life save for the family, create a sense of almost overwhelming isolation, almost sublime in its quietude. The youngest of the children, Samuel, mysteriously vanishes while under the care of the eldest daughter, Thomasin. What follows is a dizzying, paranoid descent into the delusional minds of a fanatical family on the edge of absolute wilderness, and the persecution that follows. There are few cheap thrills, but what the film suggests rings true in a deeply disturbing way.

It's essentially a story about stories, and this is where the film's real genius is. Elsewhere people have claimed that it should have been marketed as art-house rather than horror. Perhaps this would have better accommodated some people's expectations, but it would deprive The Witch of the full power of its central thesis. It shares this self-awareness with Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014), another recent horror film that fully utilises the conventions of the genre to illustrate its message. (I won't spoil its brilliance by deconstructing it here, but I will say that it goes further than The Babadook in its clever usage of horror.) In an industry divided amongst the axes of art and entertainment, films that seem to transcend this rigid apparatus stand out as perhaps the most authentic. And while The Witch isn't the most transcendent of these authentic visions (as evidenced by its leaving many baffled), it makes a brilliant case for the potential of the genre in cinema today.

Using horror to such effect, it rivals the likes of Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (2009), another film examining religion's effects on family and community. Perhaps it surpasses it through its very contrivance, the idea behind it satisfies immensely. In terms of production, the film is also exceptional. The acting, while at first seeming a bit stiff, stuck up in the drama of its world, progresses and culminates into some breathtaking scenes. Performances all round become spectacular, especially Anya Taylor Joy as Thomasin and Ralph Ineson as the father (his low, rattling northern accent fits the scenery perfectly). Both lighting and camerawork bring out the full creepiness of the landscape and the sheer primitive struggle of the period, creating ripe conditions to examine the humanity in unnerving depth. Its usage of ye-olde dialect and language accentuate the sense of alienation, the distance of characters from one another and the audience. Its a clever technique, which puts the audience right into the middle of the paranoia; what we see is as fantastically equivocal as what the characters see. Its interesting in comparison to Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God (2013), which achieved a similar affect through a completely different, more visceral means. Rather than creating a claustrophobic, stream-of-consciousness-type atmosphere, with characters leering down the lens at you, The Witch's audience involvement requires a level of intellectual participation.

The only real negative aspect of the whole experience ironically stems from the limitations of the genre. This isn't really a problem inasmuch as a hindrance of the film reaching a state of pure poetry. Genre will always be prosaic and this can hold it back from reaching total cinematic sublimity. As long as it's horror, one will always know roughly what to expect. Compare this to a Tarkovsky film, which is pure poetry, the viewer can be carried away into lofty, spiritual reaches. The Witch is first and foremost a statement and as such it can never reach the open-ended wonder that some other brilliant films do. This isn't a large price to pay for what we get instead, its barely even an actual qualm. What it is, though, is a comparison of genre to non-genre cinema, or perhaps comparing poetry to prose. Cinema needs both, and its particularly in need of more innovative, masterful prose as we get from the likes of good horror, especially The Witch.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQXmlf3Sefg