As the credits rolled, “I was having, like, anxiety,” a friend told me after I looked at him and asked what he thought of The Witch.

Robert Eggers, winner of Best Director this year at Sundance, could be, and hopefully will be, a horror icon. His feature film directorial debut, The Witch, is about a Puritan Christian family’s terrifying brush with the forces of evil in the form of a witch in the woods after having been exiled from their colony in 17th century New England.

The Witch is an unconventional horror film that relies on a slow-burn period-accurate aesthetic and creates a creeping sense of dread that grabs onto the viewer and holds on tighter as the film progresses.

What’s unconventional about this film is the second act that slows down the pace immensely in an effort to provide minute detail about a family going through the hardest turmoil any of them would face. Each character has a subset of problems completely removed from the witch in the woods that provides a downfall on their own. It’s almost as if the family would have destroyed itself without the external force of the witch taxing them further pushing and almost validating their sense of hysteria.

When the film rises from its second exposition, we’re taken on a ride filled with cryptic and disturbing imagery that finds itself sticking with the viewer long after the credits finish.

With incredible performances from Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, and Harvey Scrimshaw, the characters present their own sins in an Old English dialect that, frankly, sounds difficult to deliver in a realistic sense, but that’s exactly what we get. Ineson brings his prideful patriarch to life chopping wood constantly to preserve a masculinity that no one seems to be challenging but himself.

Throughout its hour and a half run time, the visual feast is best described, I think, as artistically bleak. The Witch is a brilliant effort in visual storytelling, coldly calculated and precise, providing enough symbolism and metaphor for the viewers to become utterly immersed.

The Witch is a rare breed of horror film that finds itself expanding the genre as it gives up the modern tropes for a tonal presentation of a Satanic fairytale.

Ben

“Real witches dress in ordinary clothes, and look very much like ordinary women.”