This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
MikeP52’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
"Black Phillip Black Phillip 🎵
A crown grows out his head...
Black Phillip Black Phillip 🎵
The Nanny Queen is dead"...
So this is The Witch, or more accurately, The VVitch; which through it's creepy old-school spelling, is supposed to invoke a kind of creepy, old-school, anti-nostalgia for terror of days past...
It's a critically-acclaimed historical-fiction horror movie; the debut film of acclaimed director Robert Houston Eggers (The Lighthouse); a great new talent; who specializes in very old school, creepy horror, with just the hint of supernatural... Much in the spirit of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, or Henry James' Turn of the Screw... (His Lighthouse is also a masterpiece; also considered a modern classic)...
It's especially very much in the same tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter... Which this movie heavily references... (Or Hawthorne's other big Puritanical witchcraft themed horror story, "Young Goodman Brown")... This could almost be a sequel to those stories... (Eggers, who believes in the occult himself, calls this a "Puritan's horror story"...)
So this is a Puritan era, (the 1600s), minimalist, fantasy-themed slasher movie about a family that's excommunicated and expelled from the New England community that they live in...
Where the town founders find that the father, William, is too rigid and unyielding, in terms of his religious views; and not willing to bow to their laws...And he also, along with their whole family, just gives them the creeps ...
(And we never learn the family's last names... Which is meant to keep them mysterious and apocryphal...)
So the Family of William is thrown out into the cold, dark New England wilderness there, this family of 6; left to fend for themselves...
Just like the pilgrims that were cast out of England...And they quickly become kind of a Puritanical Swiss Family Robinson for awhile...
And then some evil, unseen force starts picking off the family, one by one; and pitting them, each one by one; each against eachother...
(We do know there is an actual witch out there, Bathsheba*; who is hiding in the forrest, that has kidnapped William's baby son Samuel...And in a ghoulish scene, we see her cooking and eating Samuel... And she also tempts and seduces the oldest son of William, Caleb... Who as a consequence of this sinful event with Bathsheba, comes back to the family camp, sick and badly diseased... Possessed by the spirit of Satan...And in an eerie scene later in the movie...he dies... So Bathsheba is ONE villain behind the scenes that is puppetmastering, manipulating and gaslighting this poor doomed family...But we'll soon learn there's a few others!...)
And each family member is somehow mostly highly suspicious of Thomasin, the oldest girl, a teenager of about 16; of being some sort of a Witch, that is, through her dark, impure thoughts, wreaking the devil's wrath upon them; causing their bloody downfall; one by one...
(Thomasin is played by Anya Taylor Joy; of The Menu fame; in a brilliant debut performance... Notice also her name has the word "sin" in it... That's not a mistake...)
They all keep pointing their finger at poor Thomasin; blaming her.... (Just like they did with poor Hester Prynne before her...)
And they're also highly suspicious of the creepy black goat, Phillip, that seems to be weirdly present for alot of these calamities and "accidents" that keep befalling everyone... Kind of like a Puritanical Cujo...
The Puritans never did like nature; and things associated with it; like animals; and wild, untethered forestland... Filled with Native Americans...
They... (in their bigotry and small-mindedness)... Saw all such things as evil...
And somehow Thomasin becomes the main focus of everyone's terror and paranoia...
And while WE CAN'T see any of this while it's happening... It seems like Thomasin is just a sad, lost girl, who's being wrongly accused...A victim of puritanical misogyny... A victim of circumstance... And Bathsheba's evil puppetmastering manipulations...
But then much happens during the story, to give one pause... (Including the father getting killed by Black Phillip, who suddenly bucks and gores him to death, while he's in an argument with Thomasin...)
And then indeed, though, by the end of the story, we see that Black Phillip was indeed Satan; and Thomasin WAS indeed likely summoning his intervention so that she could be freed by these earthly binds... (Or at least SUBLIMINALLY doing as much...)
And when Black Phillip, in the startling final sequence, after the rest of the family is dead as a doornail; all befallen by sickness and other "accidents"...(And Thomasin is clearly not the slightest bit sad about this.... She doesn't mourn them for very long, that's for sure!!!)...When Phillip Suddenly stands up on his hind legs, (like a man!!), and asks Thomasin, (in a now famous and iconic line)..."Wouldst thou like to live, deliciously?"... In a jet black voice, as deep and low as only Satan's could be ...And we suddenly realize this must be the case!...
And then we watch in horror as the final events unfold...
Particularly when Phillip hands her a pen to sign her soul away... And she, indeed, does...
And then suddenly she strips naked, walks into a clearing in the enchanted forrest, and starts cackling in laughter like a wild hen... (Or a VVitch... And this scene, where Anya Taylor Joy is walking nude into the clearing of the enchanted forrest, is the subject of the iconic movie poster for The Witch...)
And then Thomasin suddenly flies up into the trees with all the other vicious, naked witches, like Bathsheba, who was summoning her and manipulating Thomasin to be her little acolyte this whole time...
And they're all there, these evil creatures; flying up in the treetops as well; naked, all of them... All of them waiting for her... Thomasin's new coven...
And we suddenly then see who Thomasin has actually been, this entire time... And who she has become...
It's a very startling ending to a very creepy, effective film...
And, as stated before, not much happens here...This is not some action-heavy, super-bloody, Battle Royale type gorefest; like the Evil Dead movies...Or Friday the 13th...
No.
It's all, infact, about ATMOSPHERE... It's all about SUSPENSE... All about what's implied...
Robert Houston Eggers is the master of the slow-burn, subtle, ATMOSPHERIC horror... And he reminds me alot of Roman Polanski and his approach that he used with Rosemary's Baby, in that sense...
The VVitch was a big breakout sleeper hit in 2015; and was a big critical darling; winning all sorts of awards upon it's premiere...
And the critical community already considers this to be kind of a modern classic at this point... (With good reason!...)
But The VVitch, in spite of all this, is really not a terrifying movie... (Stephen King did call this movie "terrifying" in his review of it; but I really don't agree...)
It's more creeptastic... It's all about the slow-build, slow-burn crescendo of suspense and off-screen terror ...stuff you can't see...
And if that's not you're thing; this isn't for you...But if it is; you're in for quite the Halloween treat! 🎃
Overall: Highly recommended creep-fest about a secret, undercover witch... 🧹 🐺 🐐🌲 🌲🔥
*I nickname the actual witch that's terrorizing the family "Bathsheba" for the purposes of this article. We never actually learn her real name; but she's played by two actresses: Bathsheba Garnett, (the older incarnation of the character); and Sarah Stevens, (the younger incarnation of the character...)
**The full name of the movie is actually The Witch: A New England Folk Tale
***One of my fellow Letterboxers cynically nicknamed this "Sabrina The Teenage Witch Joins a Sorority".... I think that's a little reductive!