In the dim glow of candlelight, terror crawls from the shadows of Robert Eggers’ “The Witch,” a nightmare birthed from the darkest corners of American folklore. This isn’t just another horror film – it’s a fever dream dredged from the collective unconscious of our Puritan ancestors, their fears made manifest in every frame, every whispered prayer, every crack of dried wood in the endless forest beyond. I’ve watched this film countless times, and each viewing peels back another layer of meaning, another shadow of understanding in its dark mirror.
The year is 1630, and we’re watching a family’s slow descent into madness, frame by agonizing frame. Pride becomes their first sin as Ralph Ineson’s William, voice like gravel in a steel drum, leads his clan into exile. But it’s in the eyes of Anya Taylor-Joy’s Thomasin where the real story burns – a flame of youth and rebellion trapped in a prison of rigid faith and crushing responsibility. Her performance haunts me still, a reminder of how thin the line between piety and madness truly runs.
The forest looms before them like a medieval tapestry of doom, branches reaching like gnarled fingers into a grey sky that never seems to brighten. Eggers, in his directorial debut, crafts each shot with the precision of a master painter working in shadows and whispers. The family builds their home on the edge of this wooden hell, and we watch – oh, we watch – as their world crumbles like autumn leaves in a witch’s brew. I found myself holding my breath during these early scenes, knowing the horror that waits in those woods, feeling the weight of inevitable doom pressing down like a stone on my chest.
When baby Samuel vanishes during a game of peek-a-boo, the crack in their pious facade splits wide open. This isn’t just a tale of loss – it’s psychological warfare. Katherine, played with haunting intensity by Kate Dickie, spirals into grief that feels like a physical presence, a sixth member of the family that feeds on their collective despair. Her performance is a masterclass in suffering, each scene peeling back another layer of sanity until there’s nothing left but raw, maternal agony. The scene where she cradles what she believes to be her returned infant, only to find herself nursing a crow, struck me like a physical blow – a perfect metaphor for the way grief can corrupt even our most tender moments.
The authenticity bleeds from every pore of this film. Eggers didn’t just research the period – he excavated it, resurrected it, forced us to live in it. The dialogue, pulled from actual period sources, flows like dark honey, thick with religious fervor and Old English cadence. Even the candles are period-accurate, three-wicked monsters casting strange shadows on stranger faces. This attention to detail creates an immersion so complete it becomes almost suffocating – I found myself gasping for air in my climate-controlled living room, as if the thick, superstitious atmosphere of 1630s New England had somehow seeped through the screen.
But it’s young Harvey Scrimshaw as Caleb who delivers the film’s most gut-wrenching moment. His “prayer” – if we dare call it that – is a religious ecstasy that borders on the obscene, a child’s face transformed into a mask of terrifying rapture. It’s the kind of scene that burrows under your skin and nests there, laying eggs of discomfort that hatch months later in the dark of night. I’ve seen hardened horror fans turn away from this scene, not from gore or violence, but from the raw, uncomfortable intimacy of watching a child’s soul tear itself apart.
The film’s sound design is a character unto itself, a witch’s chorus of whispers and woodland sounds that build to a crescendo of madness. Mark Korven’s score doesn’t so much accompany the film as haunt it, strings screaming in the void between faith and damnation. This isn’t background music – it’s the sound of souls being torn apart. The way the score interweaves with the natural sounds of the forest created moments where I couldn’t tell if I was hearing music or the whispers of something ancient and terrible moving just beyond the edge of sight.
Then there’s Black Phillip, the family’s goat who might be Satan himself, might be a projection of their collective madness, might be both or neither. In any other film, a goat as the avatar of evil would border on parody. Here, it’s an instrument of pure psychological terror, each “baa” a mockery of their prayers, each casual destruction a reminder that evil often wears the most mundane of masks. What’s most disturbing is how natural it feels – in this world of rigid beliefs and supernatural fears, of course the Devil would come as a goat, testing the family’s faith with every innocuous bleat.
This is folk horror that gets under your fingernails and into your bloodstream. It’s not about jump scares or gore (though when violence comes, it comes with biblical fury). It’s about the horror of isolation, the terror of questioning one’s own salvation, the madness that breeds in the spaces between absolute faith and creeping doubt. Watching this family unravel feels like watching a slow-motion car crash in a world where seat belts haven’t been invented yet – you know the impact is coming, but you’re powerless to prevent it.
The film builds to a conclusion that feels both inevitable and shocking, a dark baptism in the woods that’s either liberation or damnation – or perhaps both. Taylor-Joy’s final scene, as she gives herself over to whatever waits in the darkness, is a masterpiece of ambiguity. Her smile, as she begins to float among the witch’s sabbath, carries the weight of every woman who ever found power in being exactly what society feared she might become. In that moment, I felt a disturbing mixture of horror and triumph – horror at what she’s become, triumph that she’s finally free.
For all its supernatural elements, the true horror of “The Witch” lies in its humanity. It’s about family, about faith, about the terrible things we do to each other when fear and isolation strip away our civilized veneer. The real witch might not be in the woods at all – she might be in the paranoia that turns mother against daughter, brother against sister, faith against reason.
Shot with those magnificent 1940s Cooke lenses that blur the edges of reality, every frame feels like a Rembrandt painting left too long in the rain. The film’s commitment to historical accuracy extends beyond mere set dressing – it’s in the very marrow of the story. This could be a documentary from 1630, if such a thing were possible, a window into a time when the devil was as real as the dirt under your fingernails and salvation was a currency more precious than gold.
“The Witch” isn’t just a film – it’s a time machine, a nightmare, a warning. It’s about what happens when faith becomes fear, when love becomes suspicion, when the darkness in the woods becomes indistinguishable from the darkness in our hearts. In an age of increasing polarization and paranoia, its themes ring with terrible clarity.
This is horror at its most primal and profound, a story that would have terrified audiences in 1630 just as surely as it terrifies us today. It’s a reminder that the real monsters aren’t the ones that go bump in the night – they’re the ones that whisper in our ears, telling us to fear our neighbors, our family, ourselves.
Would you like to live deliciously? The witch’s final offer becomes less a temptation and more an escape route from a world where salvation comes with too high a price. In the end, “The Witch” leaves us questioning not just what we believe, but why we believe it, and what those beliefs cost us in the darkness of our own personal forests. Each time I revisit this film, I find myself wondering: in Thomasin’s place, faced with the choice between crushing piety and delicious damnation, what would I choose?