The Witch *** (2015, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie) – Movie Review

Something wicked this way comes. Writer-director Robert Eggers has already won four prestigious awards for his classy and chilling horror movie, based on America’s first witch hysteria in New England, 60 years before the Salem witch trials.

It is his début as writer-director but his work as production designer and costume designer shows in a realistic and extremely smart-looking movie that really puts you in the place of 1630 New England. On, presumably, a low budget, it is incredibly visually imaginative and indeed looks perfect.  Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography, Craig Lathrop’s production designs and Linda Muir’s costume designs are superb. So good, in fact, that The Witch plays like a mainstream art movie, something emphasised further with its use of actual antique dialogue.

Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie play William and Katherine, scarily well, a pair of grimly devout Puritans homesteading near a wilderness, with their five children. Banished from a secure compound, they start a life on their own on their isolated New England farm. But, when their newborn son vanishes and their crops fail, the family fall prey to the forces of inescapable evil in the woods beyond their farm and are torn apart by witchcraft, black magic and possession.

Given some very tricky stuff to do, Anya Taylor-Joy and Harvey Scrimshaw give remarkably strong, grown-up performances as the family’s two older children, Thomasin and Caleb. And Mark Korven’s eerie score adds greatly too the atmosphere of mounting tension.

Stephen King has stated that he was terrified by The Witch. The Satanic Temple has also endorsed it, saying it is ‘an impressive presentation of Satanic insight’. The best two things about it are that it is unique as well as a work of art. Even if bears a distant resemblance to the movie of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1996), there’s no other movie like it.

Whether it is actually scary or not, we’ll have to leave up to individuals. Did you find The Blair Witch Project (1999) scary? Well, this is certainly a whole lot scarier than that. If you don’t get The Witch, you’ll find it a one-way ticket to dullsville. But if you do, you’ll fall under its spell. I don’t think this film is for everyone, but those who like it will probably love it.

For once the trailer is a huge, accurate help to finding out whether you’re likely to like the movie:

© Derek Winnert 2016 Movie Review

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/