Video review: "The Witch"

Horror films seem to fall into two categories these days. There are the traditional slasher/paranormal fright fests, replete with nudity and gore. And then there are the outliers who get talked up as game-changers that will take the genre in a different direction. I’m not sure how much they actually succeed at this, but they at least represent a measure of striving often lacking in run-of-the-mill horror.

Last year’s “It Follows” and now “The Witch” fall into the latter category.

Set in 1600s Puritan New England, “The Witch” is the story of a family that leaves the safety of their colonial settlement to live in the remote woods, where all sorts of terrible things happen. Writer/director Robert Eggers makes a strong debut with a deeply atmospheric and downright creepy descent into repressed terrors.

The beauty of this tale is the clan’s antediluvian notions of the Holy Spirit or Satan’s malevolence residing anywhere in their environs. With our modern sensibilities, we would dismiss this as paranoia. But their superstitions prove to be true, as there really is an old hag brewing potions – and possibly other threats – residing in the forest.

Ralph Ineson is solid as the father, a fire-and-brimstone sort, as is Katie Dickie as the mentally fragile mother. The real star is Anya Taylor-Joy as Thomasin, a teen girl and oldest child who becomes the locus of ill tidings. Things start with the disappearance of her baby brother, literally before her eyes, and get worse as other siblings begin babbling dark incantations.

We suspect they’re faking it at first, recalling the Salem witch trials, but later… not so much.

The dialogue can be hard to understand at times. I appreciated Eggers wanting to replicate period speech as accurately as possible; but this is one of those times that coherence should’ve been a higher priority. You might want to watch it with English subtitles turned on.

Still, if this is the new face of horror, I’ll suffer a few “thees” and “thines” as the price of admission.

Bonus features aren’t terribly extensive, but are impactful. Eggers provides a feature-length audio commentary. There is also a making-of featurette, “The Witch: A Primal Folklore,” a Q&A with a panel in Salem and a gallery of design stills.

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Review: "The Witch"

Atmospheric and archaic, “The Witch” is a bold take on the horror genre that’s both quite old and disturbingly new.

Set in 1630 New England against a backdrop of Puritans fresh off the boat from England, it’s about a hyper-religious family that stakes its claim in a remote stretch of forest only to experience disturbances they ascribe to satanic forces. One of the beauties of writer/director Robert Eggers’ approach, who makes his feature film debut, is that he leaves their state deliberately open to interpretation -- at least for a time.

At first, we think it’s all in the heads of these superstitious people, who cast suspicion on each other for what’s happening to them. The family believes in the literal truth of every word in the Bible, so the idea of the Devil appearing to enlist them or witches trolling the forest is viewed as entirely plausible. We see how pliable they are, and understand how the Salem witch trials came to be.

But eventually it becomes clear that just because the siblings accuse each other of being witches to deflect blame doesn’t mean there really isn’t an old hag off brewing spells.

Things go bad early when the baby boy Samuel is snatched out of the care of the oldest daughter, Thomasin, literally while her eyes are closed during a game of peek-a-boo. Played by the luminous Anya Taylor-Joy, Thomasin shoulders much of the burden for caring for the younger children -- not to mention the quiet, inexplicable ire of her mother, Katherine (Katie Dickie).

After days of searching, they give up the infant’s fate. The father, William (Ralph Ineson), blames a wolf rather than believe Thomasin’s supernatural tale of sudden vanishing. But then eldest son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) disappears, too, and the tykes, Mercy and Jonas (Ellie Grainger and Lucas Dawson) seem to share a fey commune with the alpha goat, whom they dub Black Philip.

With his long face, sad eyes and voice so deep it seems to issue up from the very pit of the earth, Ineson is a compelling figure as the patriarch, whose soul is weaker than his commanding demeanor suggests. And Dickie, who played a mentally unbalanced mother in “Game of Thrones,” brings some of those unnerving aspects to this role, too.

But it’s really Thomasin’s story, as we see everything through her eyes. We understand her resentment at such a cloistered life, her yearning for a wider world and even her attempts to cast blame elsewhere. She’s good, but not pure, because no one is.

With its perpetually gray skies and earthy backgrounds, the film is virtually monochromatic except for Thomasin’s golden hair -- and the inevitable blobs of blood that come drip, drip, dripping into the frame.

It’s not the most accessible film, and Eggers’ devotion to accurate period speech -- thees and thines, etc. -- often makes it difficult to understand the dialogue.

But “The Witch” is a movie you feel more in your bones than the head. It creeps into your innards like a pestilence, and stays to feast.