Ding-dong, 'The Witch' is deadly
From the moment that Robert Eggers' elegantly nasty supernatural tale begins, we're teleported back to New England in the year 1630.
We're instantly terrified. And we don't even know why.
Yet.
Not since Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" - a key inspiration for Eggers - has a motion picture been pumped with so much ominous dread.
Like "The Shining," Eggers' "The Witch" tells the story of family members who move to an isolated location where they become assaulted by supernatural forces out to undermine their humanity and capture their souls.
A pious, stoic farmer named William (Ralph Ineson) has been exiled from his Christian community for some vague, unspecified reasons.
He settles on a remote tract of land near a dark woods with his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) and their five children, the youngest being the baby Samuel, the first to become a victim of the witch.
One day, Samuel's teenage sister Thomasin (a promising star turn for the engaging Anya Taylor-Joy) plays peekaboo with him. The baby abruptly vanishes in a literal blink of her eyes.
Gnashing of teeth and harsh accusations follow, with Thomasin becoming the scapegoat not only for Samuel's disappearance, but for other unexplained phenomena around the farm.
Thomasin's blossoming sexuality hasn't gone unnoticed by her quiet, adolescent brother Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), compelled to sneak guilty glimpses of her bust.
Later, Caleb comes upon an old shack in the woods. Out comes an amply endowed woman, clearly capitalizing on Caleb's growing fascination with the female form.
We know this can't be good.
Eggers supplies more turns of the screw as the family begins to fragment and fall apart. Katherine is inconsolable over her missing baby. William becomes fraught with guilt that his pride has provoked the wrath of God.
Their young twins, Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson), become convinced Thomasin is in league with the devil, or has the family goat, named Black Philip, been telling them this?
"The Witch" derives its raw impact from classic fairy tales and Eggers' uncompromising sense of detail in all aspects of filmmaking.
To get the proper effect from his young actors, Eggers showed them YouTube videos depicting people purportedly possessed by demons.
To create authentic dialogue, Eggers reread Shakespeare to capture the cadence of Jacobean grammar. He lifted verbatim entries from Puritan diaries, period pamphlets on witches, court documents and Puritan prayer manuals. Some dialogue comes straight from New England accounts of witchcraft and possession.
The family costumes were handmade with period materials. The sets were built to period specs down to hand-riven oak clapboards and reed-thatched roofs, but with extra large windows so that cinematographer Jarin Blaschke would have sufficient natural light to shoot carefully framed, color-bled footage in an uncomfortably narrow picture size.
Eggers' most valuable ally must be composer Mark Korven, whose unnerving blend of eerie choral works and dissonant music merges with sound designer Adam Stein's recordings of cold winds and natural noises to create a "low-frequency tension" that raises our hackles the moment "The Witch" begins.
Oh, maybe that's why we're instantly terrified.
“The Witch”
Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Isenson, Kate Dickie
Directed by: Robert Eggers
Other: An A24 Films release. Rated R for violence, nudity. 92 minutes