Writer-director Robert Eggers’ debut feature, The Witch, is a film that immediately transports the viewer to a strange and unsettling alien world: New England of the year 1630, where a Puritan family struggles to survive -- and stay together -- in the face of the brutal wilderness and mysterious, evil forces that surround their lonely, isolated farm.
But there’s more at work in this film than the tried and true horror notion of what lurks beyond, and it’s that chord of religious fanaticism and familial disintegration that really sticks with you long after the closing credits have rolled.
The father of the family is William (Ralph Ineson of Game of Thrones, Harry Potter and The Office), a devout man of faith whose belief system is apparently too extreme even for his fellow Puritan colonists. As such, William and his wife and children are expelled from the colony, and head out alone into the unknown with all of their worldly possessions strapped to an unwieldy wagon. They eventually find a plot of land on the edge of a forest, but as Eggers’ camera trains ominously on a single tree at the tip of the woods, it’s abundantly clear that this is not prime real estate at all.
Continue reading…
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But there’s more at work in this film than the tried and true horror notion of what lurks beyond, and it’s that chord of religious fanaticism and familial disintegration that really sticks with you long after the closing credits have rolled.
The father of the family is William (Ralph Ineson of Game of Thrones, Harry Potter and The Office), a devout man of faith whose belief system is apparently too extreme even for his fellow Puritan colonists. As such, William and his wife and children are expelled from the colony, and head out alone into the unknown with all of their worldly possessions strapped to an unwieldy wagon. They eventually find a plot of land on the edge of a forest, but as Eggers’ camera trains ominously on a single tree at the tip of the woods, it’s abundantly clear that this is not prime real estate at all.
Continue reading…
Continue reading...