Robert Eggers (2015)
The writer-director Robert Eggers won the Best Director prize at last year’s Sundance for The Witch, his first feature. In an interview published in Indiewire later in 2015, Eggers explained that:
‘I tried to make a lot of films and no one wanted to make them. They were too weird, too obscure. I thought, ‘I have to make a genre film that’s personal to me.’ If I’m going to make a genre film, it has to be personal and it has to be good.’
Eggers, in other words, understood and accepted the tension between personal artistic expression and movie-making economics – and set out to create a film that struck a decent bargain between the two. To a considerable extent, he’s succeeded. The Witch, which cost only $1m to make, has to date taken more than $27m at the box office (although I was in an audience of one at Curzon Wimbledon last week!) The film is currently 90% ‘fresh’ on Rotten Tomatoes, from nearly two hundred reviews. It’s an intelligent and a distinctive piece of work – it is ‘good’, in plenty of ways. The Witch would be better still if it were freer than it is from the conventions of the horror-movie genre. If it had been more ‘personal’, though, it wouldn’t have done so well. That would have made it much harder for Robert Eggers to pursue in future ‘weird’ and ‘obscure’ projects close to his heart.
The Witch bears an onscreen subtitle, ‘A New England Folktale’. Legends on the screen at the end explain that its imagery, dialogue and storyline draw extensively on historical texts (diaries, records of witchcraft trials and so on) which Eggers researched. Virtually the only characters in the film – after its first scene and except for the witches (they are plural) – are the members of a single family: a man, his wife and their five children. Eggers’s tale is set in Puritan New England in 1630. The family has settled there, having emigrated recently enough for the two older children, as well as their parents, to remember life in the old country (in the North of England, judging from their accents). In the opening scene, the paterfamilias William (Ralph Ineson) is being tried by a kind of Puritan curia for the sin of ‘prideful conceit’. The little William says at the hearing makes it clear that he not only has decided religious convictions but thinks he knows better than the community’s governor (Julian Richings), who presides in the courtroom. When the latter threatens him with banishment from the plantation where the community is based, the hot-headed William is almost raring to go. He tells his relatively uncertain wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) and children to follow him out. We see the family leaving the plantation. The high gates of the place close behind them.
In spite of William’s moral self-confidence, this departure has obvious resonances with the biblical expulsion from Eden. William ‘is forced to till the ground from whence he was taken.’ The family set up a smallholding, on the edge of deep woods, but the harvest fails. William resorts to hunting or setting traps for wild animals, with the help of Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), his second child and eldest son. William also sells a silver cup which Katherine inherited from her father – an object of religious significance and sentimental value. It’s probably fanciful to see Caleb’s name as an anagrammatic conflation of Cain and Abel but the Genesis connotations that there are provide an apt context for a film that’s remarkable in animating its characters’ religious and superstitious states of mind. Robert Eggers’s actors build a vivid sense of living as original sinners, with an unequivocal belief in hellfire and a scarcely bearable fear of it. Anthony Lane in his New Yorker review is right to highlight an early conversation in The Witch between William and Caleb:
‘A father and his son, a boy of twelve or so, go into a wood. They are out hunting, armed with a gun. As they walk, they engage in one of those ordinary, man-to-man chats that arise on a country stroll. “Canst thou tell me what thy corrupt nature is?” the father asks. “My corrupt nature is empty of grace, bent unto sin, only unto sin, and that continually,” the lad replies. Clearly, he has learned the words by rote, yet they don’t sound tired or hollow in his mouth; he means them.’
There are times when watching The Witch brings to mind Arthur C Clarke’s excoriation of religion as ‘most malevolent and persistent of all mind viruses’. Robert Eggers certainly shows how religious dogma and superstition are intertwined in the family’s souls; whether the increasing dominance of superstition is a further comment on its relationship with Christian belief or a plot necessity, is harder to say. In a simple but visually imaginative and startling scene, the eldest child, the teenage Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), is looking after the youngest, baby Samuel, and playing peek-a-boo with him. Samuel’s laughing reactions are shown from Thomasin’s point of view; when she puts her hands over her eyes, the viewer, like her, sees nothing. On the fourth peek-a-boo Thomasin takes her hands away to find that Samuel has gone. Eggers then allows the audience to see something the family in the film don’t see (unless, that is, what we’re really seeing is being imagined by one of the characters). Samuel has been taken by a witch. She kills the baby and uses his blood and body fat to make an ointment, which she rubs onto her body.
The vanishing of the unbaptised Samuel sends the forces of religious paranoia and increasingly desperate superstition into synergistic overdrive. Thomasin is naturally blamed by her parents, especially her mother, for the baby’s disappearance and experiences terrible feelings of guilt. Her twin siblings, Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson), accuse Thomasin of being a witch. It seems like a kids’ game at first – though it’s one that makes you feel immediately uneasy – and Thomasin plays along. It’s far from a game by the time Katherine is suspecting her elder daughter of being responsible for everything that goes wrong – for the loss of the silver cup as well of as Samuel, then for the death of Caleb.
As the malign grip on the family strengthens, viewers of The Witch also find themselves mired in uncertainty as to who and what’s behind it all. Is the hare that stares out from the margin of the woodland a witch’s familiar? Is the family’s goat, Black Philip, a manifestation of the Devil? (Two bouts between William and the goat’s horns have shockingly different registers.) Is it the six- or seven-year-old twins who are agents of evil, rather than their older siblings? The film prompts that question even as it implies the sexual development of Thomasin and Caleb gives them greater proximity to the forces of darkness – and a new understanding of being ‘bent unto sin, only unto sin’. Caleb never recovers from his and Thomasin’s foray into the woods and his encounter there with, and seduction by, a young witch. He returns to the family homestead naked and falls mortally ill. Before he dies, Caleb speaks words that suggest brief possession by angels, as well as by devils. On his deathbed, he also vomits a whole apple, a piece of fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
That apple is as apparently real to the viewer as to the characters in the story. So is the blood on Katherine’s nightdress, following a vision involving her dead sons, her silver cup and a raven to which she exposes her breast as she gives suck to Samuel. These things recall the tear on the schoolroom slate in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents – a tear which, since it hasn’t been shed by the governess, Miss Giddens, seems to have been produced by the ghost of Miss Jessel. Pauline Kael described the tear as ‘that little pearl of ambiguity’ and we continue to be uncertain, even when Clayton deploys more familiar supernatural effects in the second half of The Innocents, whether or not what we see is all in the mind of the governess. As The Witch builds to a climax, its ambiguity lessens, however – and the film’s effectiveness with it.
From an early stage, there have been indications of Robert Eggers’s anxiety to satisfy audience expectations. The crescendos of moaning voices and shrieking strings in Mark Korven’s score are one example, the objective appearances of the witches another. For much of the time, these seem merely interruptions to a more subtle realisation of physical and mental landscapes. The cinematographer Jarin Blaschke presents the family home and its environs in suitably parched earth tones. The mystery and menace of the forest are greater for appearing, more often than not, in natural daylight rather than nocturnal darkness. We might have expected the newcomers to New England to have their religious certainties confounded through confrontation with indigenous non-Christians but the only Native Americans we see are glimpsed briefly (and surprisingly), within the plantation, as the family departs from it. They are pitted, rather, against terrors they’ve brought with them from Old England. (The heart of darkness in the story operates as a kind of perverse antidote to homesickness).
In the final stages, though, complexity is displaced by revelations and events that are unambiguous and generically conventional. When Black Philip speaks to Thomasin, it’s confirmation that he’s Satan in bestial form. Thomasin then wanders naked into the forest and initiation into the witches’ coven. The poster for the film, which shows this image – the girl’s silhouetted form heading towards dark woodland and a full moon above – seems designed to reassure potential audiences they’re in for something more familiar than The Witch, for the most part, actually is.
The characters often suggest figures from contemporary art or book illustration come to life – particularly the children playing the twins and Kate Dickie as the mother, Katherine. Dickie in this film does the best work I’ve seen from her in some time. As William, Ralph Ineson, who’s familiar from various television roles (and as the voiceover for TV commercials), makes a strong impression visually and vocally. Anya Taylor-Joy and Harvey Scrimshaw are somehow less credible as seventeenth-century faces (and hairstyles). There’s no denying, though, that Anya Taylor-Joy’s looks hold the camera – or that Harvey Scrimshaw brings off extraordinarily well Caleb’s successive transformations on his deathbed.
17 March 2016
