The Melbourne International Film Festival, Reviewed
The best, the worst, and the weirdest of what's coming to Australian movie screens in coming months.
The Film That Will Make You Wary Around Goats:
The Witch, dir. Robert Eggers
Starring: Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Anya Taylor-Joy
Reviewed by: James Douglas
A robust mixture of historical reconstruction and supernatural thrills, The Witch (the debut feature from writer/director Robert Eggers) is a period horror piece about the evil forces menacing an isolated family in rural 17th century America.
The film begins with sternly fundamentalist patriarch William accepting exile from a community of New England puritans over some difference of religious opinion. Confident in his faith, he takes his wife Katherine and their five kids — eldest daughter Thomasin, pre-pubescent Caleb, twins Jonas and Mercy, and baby Sam — out into the wilderness, where they build a farm on the edge of a dense forest.
Soon a series of disasters befall the family, of a steadily increasing supernatural flavour: their crops are blighted, a treasured possession goes missing, infant Sam is spirited off into the woods by unseen hands, and the rowdy twin toddlers seem to be communing with the family’s sinister-looking goat Black Phillip. The scent of witchcraft is in the air.
The Witch carries the subtitle ‘A New England Folktale’ and it delivers exactly what its title suggests. Folktale is the operative label here, since Eggers is more interested in offering a faithful — and faithfully freaky — representation of 17th century superstition rather than a contemporary revision; there are few concessions to the modern instinct to rationalise witchcraft paranoia as a social phenomenon. Eggers is direct about the socio-historical factors at work — religious fervour, rural isolation, and conservative attitudes to female sexuality are particular factors here — but the film is also wonderfully direct when it comes to the reality of the menace facing the family.
An explanatory card at the end claims that many of the events, and even much of the dialogue, are lifted from contemporaneous accounts of alleged witchcraft, and the film does a remarkable job incorporating the archaic fears and behaviour of that time into a palatable dramatic and psychological framework.
It’s a risky move serving up a line like “Did ye make an unholy bond with that goat?”, but Eggers, and his uniformly excellent cast, make it sing. And, even as the events carry a tinge of absurdity, Eggers’ sure technique ensures a thick current of dread runs throughout. In line with his mission to resuscitate our primal fears of the dark wood, his film strikes for the gut, not the head.
For fans of: A Field in England, satanic panics, goats
Opening in Australia: TBC