3 out of 5

Directed by: Robert Eggers

A folktale.  That’s how the film was taglined.  But riding the tails of other underground horror hits like ‘Babadook’ and ‘It Follows,’ marketing latched on to the film’s horror leanings – it is about witches, after all – and decided to push it in that direction.  It’s understandable that that would cause some divide in expectations, as modern horror tends to be a bit more direct with its intentions, and ‘The Witch’ is as indirect as it comes, except concerning its titular villain, which it’s happy to let us know – within the confines of the movie – exists.  So back to that tagline.  In folktales, the existence of the supernatural is rarely called into question, and the story rarely stretches out to cover character arcs and beginnings, middles, and ends.  They are, instead, parables, and so the figures and events in the stories tend to serve that purpose.

There are reviews that attempt to pair this with The Witch, describing it as a tale of adolescence, or feminism, but that’s where Eggers’ construction starts to feel mixed: the story wanders about this Puritan family – exiled from a plantation to make their way on their own farm – before mostly allowing us to focus on Thomasin, the daughter, and seems deadset on evoking creepiness through held, still shots and a building string score, and yet for each moment where this would add up to palpable tension, there were an equal amount when the focus felt much ado about nothing.  Things are going wrong for the family, with children disappearing and whatnot, and soon enough we’re blaming a witch for our problems, with fingers pointed all around to say so-and-so has communed with the devil.  And over in the slowburn school of horror, we’d be left to question if there actually are nefarious forces at work, but Eggers crosses that line several times to tell us that, yes, there are, barring any last minute “it was all in their heads!” trickery.

The film is nonetheless very watchable, despite the stillness, and silence, and minimalism to its approach.  The performances are appropriately unnerving – everyone feels a step away from unraveling – and the early ‘reveal’ does end up making sense in the overall flow of the story, as placing it later would feel something like a trick.  But, just as the tagline and marketing were at odds, the internal struggle the film seems to have over being artsy and open-ended and direct makes for many moments that just seemed tossed in for atmosphere, but even on a second viewing, I can’t explain the shots’ actual need (I’m mostly just referring to held focuses on certain shots, or elongated pauses that seem to emphasize… something.).

Overall, I appreciate that Eggers kept an overt “point” out of the story (unlike Babadook) and seemed intent on making it spooky, even if some of the related decisions made the viewing uneven.  And when the credits roll, the film’s path is almost delightfully simple, enough so that I was leaning toward a higher rating.  But feelings on that don’t align until after 80 or so of those 90 minutes, so here we are, three stars later.