The Witch (2015 film)

The Witch (also known by its stylized full title, The VVitch: A New England Folktale) is a 2015 supernatural period horror film written and directed by Robert Eggers in his feature directorial debut. The film stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger and Lucas Dawson. The Witch follows a Puritan family encountering forces of evil in the woods beyond their New England farm, forces that may be either real or imagined.

An international co-production of the United States and Canada, the film premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival on January 27, 2015 and was widely released by A24 on February 19, 2016. The film received positive reviews and was a box office success, grossing $40 million against a budget of $4 million.

Plot
In 1630s New England, English settler William and his family—wife Katherine, daughter Thomasin, son Caleb, and fraternal twins Mercy and Jonas—are banished from a Puritan Plymouth Colony over a religious dispute. The family builds a farm near a large, secluded forest and Katherine has a newborn child, Samuel. One day, Thomasin is playing peekaboo with Samuel when the baby abruptly disappears and it is soon revealed that a witch has stolen the unbaptized Samuel, killing him and using his remains to make a flying ointment.

Katherine, devastated by Samuel's disappearance, spends her days crying and praying. While hunting with William, Caleb asks if Samuel's unbaptized soul will reach Heaven. William encourages Caleb to not raise the question and later reveals to Caleb that he traded Katherine's silver cup for hunting supplies. That night, Katherine questions Thomasin about the disappearance of her cup and suspects her to be responsible for Samuel's abduction. After the children retire to bed, they overhear their parents discussing sending Thomasin away to serve another family.

Early the next morning, Thomasin finds Caleb preparing to check a trap in the forest and forces him to take her with him by threatening to awaken their parents. In the woods, the two spot a hare, which sends their horse into a panic and their dog Fowler promptly chases. Caleb pursues, while the horse throws Thomasin off, knocking her unconscious. Caleb becomes lost in the woods and stumbles upon Fowler's disemboweled body. Deep in the woods, he comes across a hovel, where a beautiful young woman emerges and seduces him. Once Caleb is close enough, however, the woman's arm becomes old and decrepit and grabs Caleb. William finds Thomasin and takes her home where Katherine angrily chastises Thomasin for taking Caleb into the woods before William reluctantly admits that he sold Katherine's cup. Katherine does not allow Thomasin the chance to explain that she was there to help keep watch over Caleb.

Later that evening, Caleb has found his way home and Thomasin discovers him outdoors in the rain, naked and delirious from an unknown illness. When he awakens the next day, Caleb expels a bloody apple from his mouth; Katherine believes it to be witchcraft. Caleb passionately proclaims his love to Christ before he dies, though Katherine believes Caleb to have been under some sort of spell. The twins then accuse Thomasin of witchcraft and, in retaliation, Thomasin reveals to the parents that the twins have had conversations with Black Phillip, the family's billy goat. Enraged, William boards both Thomasin and the twins inside the goat house. Thomasin overhears William break down and confess to God that he has been prideful and made his family leave their old village out of stubbornness rather than sincere religious devotion. Later in the night, the three children are woken by the sounds of rustling in the goat house and discover a woman drinking milk from the goats. Meanwhile, inside the house, Katherine awakens to a vision of Caleb holding Samuel. After a brief discussion, Caleb offers Samuel to Katherine so she may breast feed the baby but the baby is shown to be in fact a crow that is pecking away at her breast.

The next day William awakens and walks outside to find the stable destroyed, the goats eviscerated, the twins missing and an unconscious Thomasin lying nearby with blood-stained hands. As Thomasin awakens, Black Phillip gores William before her eyes. An unhinged Katherine, who now blames Thomasin for the tragedies that have beset the family and accusing her of trying to seduce William and Caleb, attacks Thomasin, who kills her mother with a cleaver in self-defense.

Alone, Thomasin enters the stable and urges Black Phillip to speak to her. The goat responds by asking if Thomasin would like to "live deliciously" and materializes into a tall, devilishly handsome, black-clad man. Black Phillip orders Thomasin to remove her clothes and to sign her name in a book that appears before her. Thomasin follows Black Phillip into the forest, where she joins a coven of witches holding a Witches' Sabbath around a bonfire. The coven begins to levitate and a laughing Thomasin joins them, ascending above the trees.

Development
Eggers, who was born in New Hampshire, was inspired to write the film by his childhood fascination with witches and frequent visits to the Plimoth Plantation as a schoolboy. After unsuccessfully pitching films that were "too weird, too obscure", Eggers realized that he would have to make a more conventional film. He said at a Q&A, "If I'm going to make a genre film, it has to be personal and it has to be good." The production team worked extensively with British and American museums, as well as consulting experts on 17th-century British agriculture.

Eggers wanted to film the picture on location in New England but the lack of tax incentives meant he had to settle for Canada. This proved to be something of a problem for Eggers, because he could not find the forest environment he was looking for in the country. They had to go "off the map", eventually finding a location (Kiosk, Ontario) that was "extremely remote"; Eggers said that the nearest town "made New Hampshire look like a metropolis".

The casting took place in England, as Eggers wanted authentic accents to represent a family newly arrived in Plymouth.

Filming
In order to give the film an authentic look, Eggers shot only "with natural light and indoors, the only lighting was candles". Eggers also chose the spelling of the film's title as "The VVitch" in its title sequence and on posters, stating that he found this spelling in a Jacobean era pamphlet on witchcraft, along with other period texts.

In December 2013, costume designer Linda Muir joined the crew, and consulted 35 books in the Clothes of the Common People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England series to plan the costumes. The costumes were made with wool, linen, or hemp. Muir also lobbied for a larger costume budget.

Music
Mark Korven wrote the film's score, which aimed to be "tense and dissonant", while focusing on minimalism. Eggers vetoed the use of any electronic instruments and "didn't want any traditional harmony or melody in the score", and so Korven chose to create music with atypical instruments, including the nyckelharpa and the waterphone. He knew that the director liked to retain a degree of creative control, so he relied on loose play centered on improvisation "so that [Eggers] could move notes around whenever he wanted".

Release
The film had its world premiere at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, on January 27, 2015. The film was also screened in the Special Presentations section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, on September 18, 2015. A24 and DirecTV Cinema acquired distribution rights to the film. The film received very positive reactions in advance screenings, so the studios decided to give the film a wide theatrical release in the United States, on February 19, 2016.

The film was released on Blu-ray and digital HD on May 17, 2016 in the USA. The discs' extras include outtakes, audio commentary, a documentary—The Witch: A Primal Folktale, which summarizes the cast and crew's making of the film—and a 30-minute question-and-answer session filmed in Salem, Massachusetts featuring director Eggers, lead actress Anya Taylor-Joy, and historians Richard Trask and Brunonia Barry. A 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray was released on April 23, 2019.

Box office
The Witch grossed $25.1 million in the United States and Canada and $15.3 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $40.4 million.

In North America, pre-release tracking suggested that the film would gross $5–7 million from 2,046 theaters in its opening weekend, trailing fellow newcomer Risen ($7–12 million projection) but similar to opener Race ($4–7 million projection). The film grossed $3.3 million on its first day and $8.8 million in its opening weekend, finishing fourth at the box office behind Deadpool ($56.5 million), Kung Fu Panda 3 ($12.5 million) and Risen ($11.8 million).

Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 90% based on 317 reviews, with an average rating of 7.77/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "As thought-provoking as it is visually compelling, The Witch delivers a deeply unsettling exercise in slow-building horror that suggests great things for debuting writer-director Robert Eggers." Metacritic reports a weighted average score of 83 out of 100, based on 46 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C–" on an A+ to F scale, while PostTrak reported filmgoers gave it a 55% overall positive score and a 41% "definite recommend".

Writing in Variety, Justin Chang commented that "A fiercely committed ensemble and an exquisite sense of historical detail conspire to cast a highly atmospheric spell in The Witch, a strikingly achieved tale of a mid-17th-century New England family's steady descent into religious hysteria and madness." Yohana Desta of Mashable stated that The Witch is a "stunningly crafted experience that'll have you seeking out a church as soon as you leave the theater". Peter Travers, in his Rolling Stone review, gave the film 31⁄2 stars, and wrote of the film: "Building his film on the diabolical aftershocks of Puritan repression, Eggers raises The Witch far above the horror herd. He doesn't need cheap tricks. Eggers merely directs us to look inside." Stephanie Zacharek summarized the movie in Time as "a triumph of tone", writing that "Although Eggers is extremely discreet—the things you don't see are more horrifying than those you do—the picture's relentlessness sometimes feels like torment." Gregory Wakeman, writing for CinemaBlend, rated it five stars, writing that "[its] acting, lighting, music, writing, production design, cinematography, editing, and direction all immediately impress. While, at the same time, they combine to create an innately bewitching tale that keeps you on tenterhooks all the way up until its grandiose but enthralling finale." Ann Hornaday wrote in The Washington Post that the film joins the ranks of horror films such as The Exorcist, The Omen, and Rosemary's Baby, saying that The Witch "comports itself less like an imitator of those classics than their progenitor... a tribute to a filmmaker who, despite his newcomer status, seems to have arrived in the full throes of maturity, in full control of his prodigious powers." Jay Bauman of RedLetterMedia named the film his favorite film of 2016, labelling it "a masterpiece".

However, some critics as well as audiences were less pleased with the film; Ethan Sacks, of the New York Daily News, wrote that while the film does not suffer from the cinematography, acting, or setting, early on it "seems that The Witch is tapping a higher metaphor for coming of age...or religious intolerance...or man's uneasy balance with nature...or something. It doesn't take long into the film's hour and a half running time, however, to break that spell." Critics have noted that the film has received backlash from audiences regarding the film's themes and slow approach to horror; Lesley Coffin criticized A24, saying it was "a huge mistake" to market The Witch as a terrifying horror film:

"Not because it doesn't fit into the genre of horror, but because of the power of expectations. The less you know about this movie the better your experience will be, but everyone who saw it opening weekend probably walked in with too much knowledge and hype to really get as much out of it as they could have if the film had the veil of mystery."

HitFix writer Chris Eggertson was critical of mainstream Hollywood; he said that The Witch "got under [his] skin profoundly", though he argued that it "did not have the moment-to-moment, audience-pleasing shocks that moviegoers have become accustomed to thanks to movies like Sinister and The Purge and Paranormal Activity and every other Blumhouse and Platinum Dunes title in the canon."

Horror authors Stephen King and Brian Keene both reacted positively towards the film; King tweeted significant praise for the film, stating, "The Witch scared the hell out of me. And it's a real movie, tense and thought-provoking as well as visceral", while Keene, on social media, stated, "The Witch is a gorgeous, thoughtful, scary horror film that 90% of the people in the theater with you will be too stupid to understand." Jason Coffman expressed his "frustration" toward viewers who felt The Witch was "boring", saying:

"[T]hese detractors have targeted [these] films that work within the genre but are also examples of how genre cinema can explore concepts and themes in ways that less fantastic stories cannot. In short, the rejection of these films appears to people outside of horror fandom as a rejection of cinema as an art form."

Religious
Julia Alexander of Polygon states that The Witch "asks people to try and understand what life would have been like for a family of devout Christians living in solitude, terrified of what may happen if they go against the word of God". In The Atlantic, Alissa Wilkinson stated that many films featured at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival—The Witch, along with Last Days in the Desert, Don Verdean, and I Am Michael—reveal a "resurgence of interest in the religious" and described The Witch as "a chilling circa-1600 story of the devil taking over a devout, Scripture-quoting family". Eve Tushnet commented in an article in TAC, which was also published in First Things, that The Witch's view of witchcraft is "not revisionist" and further states that the film is "pervaded by the fear of God. There are occasional references to His mercy but only as something to beg for, not something to trust in".

A review by Adam R. Holz on Plugged In, a publication of the conservative Christian organisation Focus on the Family, heavily criticised the film, stating that:

"William is absolutely devoted to leading his family in holiness and the ways of the Lord, which should be a good thing. But the fruit of William's rigorous focus on dogmatic piety isn't a lifting of burdens, which we're told should happen in, or a joyful celebration of living life to the fullest, as is referenced in ; rather it is deep fear and morbid meditations on hell, nation and the forces of spiritual darkness."

Josh Larsen of Think Christian, however, offered a Christian explanation of the conclusion of the film, stating that in "encountering evil, the family in the film veers wildly back and forth between 'triumphalism' and 'defeatism,' two theological extremes" and "in refusing to allow for grace, they become easy pickings for the witch".