The Witch (2015)

	Directed by: Robert Eggers	COUNTRY USA/Canada GENRE Folk horror NORWEGIAN TITLE The Witch RUNNING TIME 92 minutes
	Produced by: Jay Van Hoy Lars Knudsen Jodi Redmond Daniel Bekerman Rodrigo Teixeira
	Written by: Robert Eggers

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Thomasin	Anya Taylor-Joy
William	Ralph Ineson
Katherine	Kate Dickie
Caleb	Harven Scrimshaw	½
Mercy	Ellie Grainger	-
Jonas	Lucas Dawson	-
Governor	Julian Richings	-

Review

Robert Eggers’ directorial debut is a simmering folk horror tale aptly titled The Witch. With its linguistic and scenographic accuracy, the movie transports you passionately back to 1630s New England and into a family of early settlers, whose everyday life is harsh and pious to the extreme. When their newborn son suddenly disappears in broad daylight, the oldest daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) watches her family members slowly disintegrate into grief, guilt, devoutness and distrustfulness. The film bases its existence on how people in this time and place had nowhere to turn to for answers except inwards or to religion. Their inability to understand their own and each others’ situation and emotional life is the implicit horror here, even if the film's ensuing delve into some very prevailing superstitions from the era is the explicit theme for Eggers’ foray into the horror genre. Perhaps it was a little misleading to market the film as a more standard horror flick, even if it certainly helped the sales. Because this is a slow-burning tale which cares less about genre-expectations than about settler era ghost stories and the circumstances that made them necessary or at least relevant at the time. If The Witch ultimately is missing something, it’s the ability to link the characters’ perception of fear to our own. But Eggers certainly demonstrated the talent that would lead him to create the even more intense The Lighthouse a few years later.