I watched The Witch on Netflix the other night, which was not the first spooky movie that I’ve watched this fall, but easily the best so far.
Before we move on any farther, I’d like to note that the title is stylized as “The VVitch” in most promotional materials. As a result, I always pronounce it “The Va-Vitch” when I say it out loud, and find it hilarious every time. Honestly I decided to write this entire post just to share that tidbit.
An unusually good modern horror movie, The Witch is not scary, but it is horrifying. There is a scene near the beginning wherein a baby is stolen and… you know what? Let’s not spoil it. The point here is that the scene was gruesome (though mostly off-camera) and truly shocking and I couldn’t do anything but stare, unblinking and slack-jawed, for the five minutes or so that it was happening.
Once that is over, things even out for a while. The story takes place in, oh, I think probably the Days of Yore? It’s about a religious family that abandons their church because of the father’s pride, and attempts to run their own little secluded farm to get by. Things go horribly askew and the farm produces only garbage crops. The children are all getting into assorted kinds of trouble, and also there’s the baby-napping. These are not good times.
Our main character is the eldest daughter, Thomasin, who is a budding young lady and happened to be watching the baby when it was yoinked. This creates oodles of tension between her and her mother, and things just keep escalating as she gets blamed for more and more unfortunate events. Right up until the end where it all comes to a head (literally).
The other characters are as follows: The aforementioned parents, who are struggling to make it in the big city middle of nowhere. The tween brother that is constantly salivating over Thomasin’s rack. A set of super annoying twins who may or may not have made a pact with Satan. A black goat named Phillip. A rabbit that shows up mysteriously here and there. With this hodgepodge cast, obviously things are going to go amiss.
I don’t really want to say much more about The Witch, because you should definitely go and watch it yourself. It’s a coming-of-age story that really doesn’t have very much in common at all with any other coming-of-age stories that I am aware of. Also it’s not that kind of horror movie. The titular Witch is real, but she never ever once jump-scares you. It’s much more frightening in the sense of seeing the events unfolding around this family and how awful life must have been back on those days. Especially for women. Sure, the supernatural elements might not exactly hit, but there’s plenty of other unsettling stuff in there that folks could easily relate to.
If there’s one gaping flaw with the film, it’s that it is so very incredibly hard to make out what anyone was saying. The dialects and accents are so thick that I had to turn on subtitles ten minutes in because I simply could not make heads or tails of the dialogue.
On the whole, though? Super good movie. It was not at all what I was expecting when I turned it on, and I’m so glad that I watched it. I’ll likely be telling people about this one for the duration of the 2016 Halloween season. Maybe even longer.
Here’s one little spoiley, because I need to type out this sentence: Someone literally gets ground into paste. But I won’t say who. *wink*